At Vast, our mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space. We are building artificial gravity space stations, allowing long-term stays in space without the adverse effects of zero-gravity. Our initial crewed space habitat will be Haven-1, scheduled to be the world’s first commercial space station when it launches into low earth orbit in May 2026. Our team is all-in, committed to executing our mission safely and on time. If you want to work with the most talented people on Earth furthering space exploration for humanity, come join us.
Vast is looking for a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, reporting to the Manager, IT Infrastructure, to support the development of the systems that will be required for the design and build of artificial-gravity human-rated space stations.
This will be a full-time, exempt position located in our Long Beach location.
You will have the opportunity to build a modern IT infrastructure from the ground up. We build our systems cloud-first, with an emphasis on researching and deploying the latest technologies and paradigms. You will identify opportunities to improve and expand our IT infrastructure to enhance speed, security, and ease of use. You will have the opportunity to plan, build, test, deliver, and maintain projects from start to finish. Likewise, you will prioritize establishing our IT function to be an ally to enhance employee productivity while balancing security.
Responsibilities:
- Architect and secure Kubernetes clusters on bare metal and cloud environments, emphasizing isolation, encryption, and policy enforcement.
- Develop and manage secure provisioning for bare metal systems, including DHCP, DNS, PXE/iPXE/HTTPBoot, and Linux, with an emphasis on measured boot, secure boot, and hardware trust.
- Build and maintain security tooling and automation (Go, Python, Bash) for provisioning, monitoring, and continuous security validation across environments.
- Collaborate with data center operations, hardware, and networking teams to enforce physical security, network segmentation, and zero-trust principles.
- Manage infrastructure configuration using GitOps (Git, Flux, Terraform) with security scanning and policy-as-code controls.
- Establish monitoring and alerting pipelines to detect, investigate, and respond to security events in infrastructure and cloud systems.
- Maintain and improve system documentation, runbooks, and security procedures for consistent, auditable, and repeatable infrastructure operations.
- Conduct threat modeling and risk assessments on infrastructure components, driving remediation to reduce the attack surface.
- Support incident response activities, including containment, analysis, and post-incident improvements to infrastructure security.
Minimum Qualifications:
- 3+ years experience designing, deploying, and managing highly available self-hosted security services such as a SIEM.
- Years of experience in building modern DevOps tools & best practices: CI/CD systems, deployment tools (CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
- Deep expertise with the cloud and Kubernetes.
- Understanding of networking/security/auth constructs and requirements.
Preferred Skills & Experience:
- Experience with Kubernetes security (RBAC, PodSecurity, admission controllers, policy enforcement, and runtime security tooling).
- Experience building and maintaining observability pipelines (Falco, eBPF, OSQuery, or similar tooling).
- Proficiency with Linux and Kubernetes bootstrapping with a focus on secure provisioning.
- Experience collaborating with facilities, hardware, or network teams to enforce physical and logical security in a data center environment.
U.S. EXPORT CONTROL COMPLIANCE STATUS
The person hired will have access to information and items subject to U.S. export controls, and therefore, must either be a “U.S. person” as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.62 or otherwise eligible for deemed export licensing. This status includes U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), and asylees and refugees with such status granted, not pending.EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
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What We Do
Vast is developing artificial gravity space stations to expand humanity across the solar system.
Vast’s mission is to enable large populations of humans to live and work in space, permanently.
Our solar system has the resources and room for humanity to thrive and expand without destroying Earth’s biosphere. Unlocking these resources requires in-space infrastructure and industry at an unprecedented scale.
We are building a world-class team to engineer the human experience in space.
Why Work With Us
We're developing artificial gravity space stations to expand humanity across the solar system in order to enable large populations to live and work in space. Not only is what we're working on groundbreaking, but the team prides itself on living by our values of respect, curiosity, action, and excellence making it a lot more fun to achieve our goal.
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