Senior DevOps Engineer (f/m/d)

Isar Aerospace SE; Pennsylvania; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employee Participation Program

30 days vacation

Company pension plan

Subsidised lunch

Public transport ticket

Rental clothing with laundry service

Sport Club membership

Individual learning allowance

Childcare allowance

And Much More!

Job summary

Isar Aerospace SE is seeking a Senior DevOps Platform Engineer to own the runtime for Ground Systems across on-premise Kubernetes and cloud services. You'll design cluster architectures, automate provisioning, and maintain the reusable delivery platform used by product teams.

You'll lead GitOps with ArgoCD, manage Terraform/Ansible configurations, and advance the developer experience with scalable, secure workflows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles.
• Strong Linux, shell proficiency, networking, storage, and security basics.
• Hands-on Kubernetes beyond managed services with CI/CD experience.
• GitLab CI/CD know-how and practice with ArgoCD (GitOps).

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve software platform capabilities enabling secure, reliable delivery.
• Design on-premise and cloud Kubernetes topology and platform architecture.
• Automate provisioning and upgrades of clusters across environments.
• Maintain GitLab CI/CD library, Helm charts, and IaC modules.

Skills

Platform engineering

DevOps

SRE

Kubernetes

GitLab CI/CD

Terraform

Ansible

PowerShell

Python

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

ArgoCD

Terraform

Ansible

GitLab CI/CD

Job description

Mission Brief

As a Senior DevOps Platform Engineer, you will play a key role in building and evolving the Software Platform capabilities used across Ground Systems. You will enable engineering teams with scalable, secure, and efficient development workflows while continuously improving developer productivity and software delivery.

Specifically, this is a hands-on platform engineering role with a strong infrastructure core. Your mission is to own the runtime that Ground Systems software runs on both the on-premise Kubernetes clusters and the cloud services around them and the developer experience of getting software onto it. You will design cluster architecture, build the automation that provisions and maintains clusters across environments, and maintain the reusable delivery platform (GitLab CI/CD library, container toolchains, Helm charts, IaC modules) that product teams consume.

Your role in our Space Mission...

• Own and continuously evolve software platform capabilities enabling secure, reliable, and efficient software delivery
• Design and evolve the architecture of on-premise and cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters and the surrounding platform: control-plane/worker topology, networking, storage, secrets management, and multi-environment promotion models.
• Make and document architecture decisions as ADRs and standards that other teams build against, balancing reliability, operability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Build and maintain automation that initialize, upgrades, and recovers clusters end to end as well as certificate lifecycle, node drains and upgrades, storage provisioning and incident management.
• Provision the on-premise and cloud-hosted substrate with Terraform and configure it with Ansible: HAProxy load balancers, NFS shares, DNS/resolv, secondary disks, domain joins.
• Manage workloads with Helm: author, version, and maintain charts for application services and stateful components (Kafka, ClickHouse, MQTT brokers, MSSQL), with automated semVer releases driven from merge requests.
• Practice GitOps with ArgoCD: installation, Azure Entra ID SSO and RBAC, and reconciliation troubleshooting across clusters.
• Own shared GitLab CI/CD library for jobs, templates, rules, semVer/release/changelog automation
• Operate developer-facing platform tooling and the container toolchain behind those pipelines including observability.

What you´ll need to thrive...

• 5+ years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Software Infrastructure or SRE-type roles.
• Strong Linux proficiency, comfortable on the shell, troubleshooting systemd, networking, DNS, storage, permissions and file systems.
• Deep Kubernetes experience beyond the managed-service basics: cluster bootstrapping, CNI, ingress/load balancing, storage classes, RBAC, upgrades, and cert management.
• Strong hands-on GitLab CI/CD experience, including reusable components and pipeline-as-a-product maintenance.
• Practical GitOps with ArgoCD
• Solid Microsoft Azure background: AKS, Container Registry, Key Vault, managed identity/service principals and least-privilege RBAC.
• IaC experience with Terraform and Ansible
• Comfortable with containerization: image building and hardening, Helm authoring and versioning.
• Proven ability to design and document architecture, and to defend trade-offs to both engineers and stakeholders.
• Scripting proficiency in Python, Bash and PowerShell.
• Pragmatic support sensibility: you help teams debug a broken pipeline or pod the same day.

Nice to have...

• Data platform understanding for Kafka, ClickHouse, MQTT/streaming ingestion, MSSQL, Databricks or similar fit into an operational data pipeline
• Working knowledge of identity/networking at the edge: HAProxy, VLANs, multicast, corporate DNS and proxy constraints.
• Experience with Agentic Engineering workflows and engineering productivity tooling.
• Exposure to aerospace, mission-critical, or export-controlled/regulated environments.
• Familiarity with .NET build and release pipelines.

Join a team where platform engineering is recognized as a product, developer experience is a priority, and automation is at the heart of everything we do. We're looking for engineers who are excited by ownership, motivated by technical excellence, and driven to build scalable platforms that others rely on every day. Don't worry if your experience doesn't match every single qualification. We'd love to learn how your skills, ideas, and perspectives could help us continue to evolve and innovate.

Benefits

• Employee Participation Program: Share in our success through our virtual company share program
• 30 days of vacation: Enjoy the days off to relax and recharge
• Company pension plan: Secure your future with our company pension plan, featuring a 20% employer contribution after the probation period
• Subsidised lunch: Stay energised with delicious, subsidised lunches every day
• Public transport ticket: Commute with ease using a fully financed Deutschlandticket
• Rental clothing with laundry service: Enjoy hassle‑free workwear with our convenient rental clothing and laundry service
• Sport Clubs membership: Stay fit with our sponsored sports club memberships (EGYM Wellpass)
• Individual learning allowance: Grow your skills with an individual learning budget granted after the probation period
• Childcare allowance: Receive a childcare allowance for your non-school-age children
• And Much More! Discover additional perks and benefits when you join our team.

Who we are

We are Isar Aerospace and we are at the forefront of New Space building a modern space business to enable faster, better and cheaper access to space.

Our mission is to help democratise space and use it for good in order to improve life on Earth now and for the future generations.

We are a fast-growing company aiming to provide sustainable and environmentally friendly launch solutions for small and medium-sized satellites and constellations into Low Earth Orbit. The company is privately funded by world-leading technology investors with strong commitment and support and our team is made of driven and talented people with a real passion for space innovation.

We're making rockets in a way that hasn't been done before disrupting a traditional industry.

Want to find out more about us?

Visit www.isaraerospace.com

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Disclaimer

Isar Aerospace SE is an equal-opportunity employer committed to fairness and inclusivity. We do not prioritize any specific religion, gender, nationality, or background. Due to security clearance requirements, affiliations with countries listed under § 13 para. 1 no. 17 SÜG may affect the application process. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply.