At Vast, our mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space. Vast is developing next-generation space stations to ensure a continuous human presence in space for America and its allies, enabling advanced microgravity research and manufacturing, and unlocking a new space economy for government, corporate, and private customers. Using an incremental, hardware-rich and low-cost approach, Vast is rapidly developing its multi-module Haven Station. Haven Demo’s 2025 success made Vast the only operational commercial space station company to fly and operate its own spacecraft. Next, Haven-1 is expected to become the world’s first commercial space station when it launches, followed by additional Haven modules to enable permanent human presence by 2030. 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 Staff DevOps Engineer, reporting to the Manager, DevOps & Platform, 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.
Responsibilities:
- Develop and support CI/CD pipelines, automating the build, test, and release of frontend and backend applications for the Mission Software Team.
- Collaborate with Flight Software teams to streamline release management and integrated testing between physical and simulated flight assets and the supporting mission software.
- Design and help operate a highly secure and stable cloud environment to support in-flight missions with the suite of mission software services. Assist in the initial design of this environment as well as the migration of deployed services from development environments to the mission environment.
- Drive the operational requirements and procedures for mission software services and take ownership of reliability engineering; ensure the proper tooling is in place for monitoring and maintaining continuous uptime.
- Regularly exercise our services capabilities by orchestrating chaos testing, load testing, and automated regression testing.
- Build and expand on an internal developer portal that includes runbooks, incident response management, centralized API registry, service health metrics, and more.
- Work cross-functionally with other teams at Vast including InfoSec and IT.
- Help build the technical and cultural groundwork for a DevOps organization at Vast.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering or other engineering discipline.
- 3+ years of experience in application development with Python, Go, or Javascript/Typescript.
- Experience maintaining large-scale data systems (measured in TB and kHz) with strict SLAs and high criticality.
- Extensive experience developing and managing solutions in the cloud using Terraform.
- Deep experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes; should be able to confidently administer, configure, and operate a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster.
- Comprehensive understanding of networking concepts, both fundamental (OSI Model, linux networking appliances, etc.) as well as cloud (VPC’s, transit gateways, proper subnetting and routing, etc.).
- Ability to effectively triage priorities, communicate initiatives and timelines, and promote DevOps skills and culture within a fast-paced organization.
Preferred Skills & Experience:
- Expertise in building and testing distributed Golang applications.
- Expertise in optimally configuring and maintaining Kafka clusters.
- Expertise in setting strategy for incident response and remediation.
- Experience driving security and code quality standards through automated scanners applied to the codebase (SAST + SCA).
- Experience with self-hosted observability instrumentation in distributed systems (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, etc.).
Additional Requirements:
- Willingness to work occasional evenings and/or weekends to support critical mission milestones.
Pay Range:
- Senior DevOps Engineer: $159,000 - $226,980
- Staff DevOps Engineer: $188,600 - $267,700
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
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering or other engineering discipline
- 3+ years of experience in application development with Python, Go, or Javascript/Typescript
- Experience maintaining large-scale data systems with strict SLAs
- Extensive experience developing and managing solutions in the cloud using Terraform
- Deep experience with Docker and Kubernetes; managing multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster
- Comprehensive understanding of networking concepts
Vast Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Vast and has not been reviewed or approved by Vast.
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Healthcare Strength — Company materials describe comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents from day one, alongside primary care and mental‑health programs. These provisions are repeatedly emphasized as a core part of the total rewards package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Information highlights generous PTO with an annual cash‑out option, paid parental leave, sick time, and company holidays, with flexible PTO for exempt staff. These features indicate broad time‑off support across multiple needs.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Onsite meals and snacks, fitness memberships or stipends, and wellness resources (e.g., One Medical and Spring Health) are prominently offered. Such perks appear designed to enhance daily work experience and overall wellbeing.
Vast Insights
What We Do
Vast is developing next-generation space stations to ensure continuous human presence in space for America and its allies, enabling advanced microgravity research and manufacturing, and unlocking a new space economy for government, corporate, and private customers. Using an incremental, hardware-rich and low-cost approach, Vast is rapidly developing its multi-module Haven Station. Haven Demo’s 2025 success made Vast the only operational commercial space station company to fly and operate its own spacecraft. Next, Haven-1 is expected to become the world’s first commercial space station when it launches in 2026, followed by additional Haven modules to enable permanent human presence by 2030. With more than 1,000 employees at its Long Beach, California headquarters and over a billion dollars in private capital invested, Vast has built the facilities required to manufacture and operate America’s next space station. The company plans to develop future habitats for the Moon and Mars, dedicated space stations for government partners, and other crewed systems that will unlock the expanding long-term space economy.
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