SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.
SR. SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURE
The application software team is the central nervous system of SpaceX. Manufacturing is how SpaceX turns designs into hardware. The compute, storage, and networking that run our factories must be as reliable as the products we build. This team owns infrastructure supporting Starship, Starlink, Starshield, and Terafab. This position will have a direct impact on factory uptime, throughput, and production scale across programs.
The ideal candidate has strong software engineering fundamentals and a passion for infrastructure: reliability, stability, proactive maintenance, and scalability. You understand the system before you change it, solve hard problems, communicate clearly with stakeholders and teammates, and take ownership of work that manufacturing depends on.
Aerospace experience is not required. We value smart, motivated, collaborative engineers who treat teammates with fairness, respect, and support, and who want to take full ownership of challenging problems to help make humanity multi-planetary.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Deploy, upgrade, operate, maintain, and scale compute, storage, and networking for manufacturing systems across Starship, Starlink, Starshield, and Terafab
- Manage infrastructure as code and use observability to provide a complete picture of platform health
- Design for reliability, stability, and scale; find and remove bottlenecks with measurement and engineering
- Practice proactive maintenance: capacity planning, lifecycle management, and reducing toil before it becomes an incident
- Partner with software engineers, manufacturing stakeholders, and site teams to build operable, maintainable systems
- Improve the full lifecycle—from design through deployment, operation, and continuous refinement
- Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems
- Provide high-quality support to manufacturing and engineering users
- Communicate clearly with stakeholders and teammates
- Participate in on-call and travel to sites as needed for deployments, incidents, and cross-site reliability
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or an engineering discipline; OR 7+ years of professional experience in SRE or DevOps in lieu of a degree
- 3+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
- Experience with Linux operating systems
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Experience with compute, storage, and/or networking infrastructure in production
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or similar)
- Containers and virtualization (Docker, Kubernetes, vSphere, QEMU, KVM, etc.)
- Databases and data modeling (Postgres, Clickhouse, etc.)
- Ability to translate high-level requirements into implementations from first principles
- Comfort with mission-critical systems and appropriate urgency and care
- Skillful communication with customers, peers, and management
- Comfort operating across multiple sites and manufacturing programs
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:
- Must be able to work extended hours and weekends as needed
- Must be able to travel to different sites (Hawthorne, CA; Redmond, WA; Cape Canaveral, FL; Starbase, TX)
- Ability to pass Air Force background check for Cape Canaveral
- This role requires you to be onsite. Remote and/or hybrid work will not be considered
ITAR REQUIREMENTS:
- To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
SpaceX is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with SpaceX is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.
Applicants wishing to view a copy of SpaceX’s Affirmative Action Plan for veterans and individuals with disabilities, or applicants requiring reasonable accommodation to the application/interview process should reach out to [email protected].
Skills Required
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or an engineering discipline, or 7+ years of professional SRE or DevOps experience in lieu of a degree
- 3+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
- Experience with Linux operating systems
- Ability to work extended hours and weekends as needed
- Ability to travel to SpaceX sites in Hawthorne, Redmond, Cape Canaveral, and Starbase
- Ability to pass the Air Force background check for Cape Canaveral
- Ability to work onsite; remote and hybrid work are not considered
- Eligibility under ITAR requirements or ability to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations
- Production experience with compute, storage, and/or networking infrastructure
- Experience with infrastructure as code such as Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet
- Experience with containers and virtualization such as Docker, Kubernetes, vSphere, QEMU, or KVM
- Experience with databases and data modeling, such as Postgres or ClickHouse
- Ability to translate high-level requirements into implementations from first principles
- Comfort operating mission-critical systems and across multiple sites and manufacturing programs
- Strong communication skills with customers, peers, stakeholders, and management
SpaceX Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about SpaceX and has not been reviewed or approved by SpaceX.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity grants are a core part of total compensation, with periodic company-run tender offers that create liquidity before any public listing. These mechanisms can make the equity component feel materially valuable in practice.
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Healthcare Strength — The package includes comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with on-site clinics and health resources at major sites. This breadth of coverage is presented as a strong element of the offering.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Major locations feature on-site amenities such as fitness facilities, food/coffee, clinics, and other conveniences. These lifestyle perks enhance day-to-day value alongside cash and equity.
SpaceX Insights
What We Do
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary. SpaceX has gained worldwide attention for a series of historic milestones. It is the only private company ever to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in December 2010. The company made history again in May 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft attached to the International Space Station, exchanged cargo payloads, and returned safely to Earth — a technically challenging feat previously accomplished only by governments. Since then Dragon has delivered cargo to and from the space station multiple times, providing regular cargo resupply missions for NASA.
