On-Call AI Systems Engineer for Government Platforms

SpaceX; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 125,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision, Dental

401(k) retirement plan

Stock options / long-term incentives

3 weeks paid vacation

10+ paid holidays

Job summary

SpaceX is seeking a Software Engineer for Starshield Products to develop and operate AI capabilities for U.S. federal agencies. You will own end-to-end service reliability, respond to outages, and collaborate with product, research, infrastructure, and governance teams while upholding SpaceX standards.

You will tackle critical issues, improve observability, reduce technical debt, and help inform investments in core products. On-call rotations and occasional weekend work are expected.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or 2+ years of software development experience.
• 1+ years of hands-on software engineering building scalable systems, APIs, or AI/ML applications.
• Experience with large language models or agentic systems.
• Experience serving >10,000 users across geographies/time zones.
• Familiarity with government/public sector technology environments.
• Strong ability to translate stakeholder needs into technical solutions.
• Ability to write clean, high-performance code under tight timelines.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure; Docker/Kubernetes; API orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Own the health, performance, and stability of integrations between frontier AI models and government systems.
• Invest in documentation, metrics, monitors, and troubleshooting tools to keep services observable.
• Tackle critical issues for government customers: respond to alerts, investigate problems, implement lasting fixes.
• Partner with agency stakeholders and adjacent product teams to understand operational needs and iterate.
• Partner with agency stakeholders to understand requirements and iterate rapidly.
• Address technical debt in essential codebases and inform investments in core products.
• Participate in on-call rotations during business hours and occasional weekends.

Skills

Python proficiency

APIs/AI/ML

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

On-call experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or STEM

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

API orchestration

Job description

SpaceX is seeking a Software Engineer for Starshield Products to develop and operate AI capabilities for U.S. federal agencies. You will own end-to-end service reliability, respond to outages, and collaborate with product, research, infrastructure, and governance teams while upholding SpaceX standards.

You will tackle critical issues, improve observability, reduce technical debt, and help inform investments in core products. On-call rotations and occasional weekend work are expected.