Cloud Infrastructure Engineer - Platform Engineering at Xona Space Systems in Burlingame, California
- Company: Xona Space Systems
- Location: Burlingame, California
- Posted: Sep 23, 2026
- Type: Full-time
- Salary: $145K – $170K • Offers Equity
- Experience: 6+ years
Overview
Application Own cloud operations: You'll run our environments, from alpha to production, on AWS and Kubernetes. Your team helps software engineers scale their services, plan capacity needs, release often, and optimize costs. You empower different software teams by embedding security and infrastructu…
Job description
- Application
Responsibilities
- Own cloud operations: You'll run our environments, from alpha to production, on AWS and Kubernetes. Your team helps software engineers scale their services, plan capacity needs, release often, and optimize costs. You empower different software teams by embedding security and infrastructure best practices into their workflows.
- Develop best-in-class observability: You'll be on the team that owns our monitoring setup end to end. You implement observability infrastructure to stay ahead of SLOs with dashboards and timely alerts. We favor robust testing and monitoring culture over firefighting in prod; you'll enforce the necessary standards and processes for teams to ship with confidence.
- Automate everything: continuous delivery, high availability, hermetic builds, infrastructure-as-code, zero-downtime deployments. You’re comfortable writing quality software in at least one general purpose language. The platform team is always trying to replace manual processes to make things faster and more reproducible.
- Design for the future: as Xona's Pulsar constellation goes to 100x, new product directions are a given. You're always thinking about flexibility in our infrastructure and testing/release flows so the foundation lasts.
- Be a Kubernetes technical leader: Help establish paved-road patterns for Kubernetes deployment and operations, and become a trusted source of mentorship for teams orchestrating containers across Xona.
Requirements
- Strong infrastructure or SRE engineer who gets excited about running systems at scale and making them better every day
- Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, deployment tooling, networking, IAM, and GitOps patterns on hyperscale vendors; on-premises experience (OpenShift/etc) is also a plus.
- Thoughtful about how testing/release workflow design affect system reliability in a microservices architecture
- Experienced with container orchestration (Kubernetes/etc), infrastructure-as-code (OpenTofu/Terraform/etc), and cloud networking
- You have great instincts for observability, and your alerts or dashboards caught real problems (OpenTelemetry experience is a plus). You understand what makes for effective tooling for a rapidly scaling software team.
- You're opinionated about how to automate processes, maintain complex systems, and safely ship
- You believe in empowering SWE to understand and manage their deployments and infra autonomously
- You rise to the challenge of working in a small team with outsize impact and visibility.
- Contributions to open source infrastructure tooling (Helm charts, Terraform modules, etc.). Interest in open source build tooling (Bazel/Buck2/Nix/Guix), reproducible/hermetic/etc. builds
Skills
Required
- Strong infrastructure or SRE engineering
- Container orchestration
- Cloud networking
- Observability (alerts, dashboards)
- Automation
- Microservices architecture
- Testing/release workflow design
Preferred
- OpenTelemetry
- OpenShift/on-premises experience
- Reproducible/hermetic builds
Benefits
- $145K – $170K • Offers Equity
- The final job level and salary will be determined based on a range of factors including the candidate’s education, qualifications, knowledge, skills, abilities, and relevant experience. The listed salary range is provided to offer insight into potential compensation, but it’s not a guarantee of the final offer. While we include the full range to be transparent, offers most often fall within the middle portion rather than the top.
About Xona Space Systems
Xona is the navigational intelligence company bringing real-time, centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth. With Pulsar – the world’s most advanced PNT satellite infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit – Xona will offer a future-proof, backwards-compatible global positioning system optimized for absolute precision, superior power, and robust protection. You'll get to support a growing satellite constellation as you operate the platform serving our worldwide PNT services on AWS and on-prem, plus our observability backbone built on OpenTelemetry monitoring. We have a great culture of collaboration across engineering, platform, software, and hardware, and incredible teams building the navigation solutions that will define new generations of technology just as GPS did. We care about great developer experience and you'll have support to push for great internal DX while enforcing the platform constraints that meet our strict performance and reliability are central requirements. We're solving hard engineering problems: we want you to work with all of our software teams and understand their unique needs from our platform infrastructure, rather than living in a DevOps silo. Xona is in a period of strong growth: building out support for the satellite constellation and accelerating partnerships with our enterprise PNT users. You're not just maintaining a dusty, legacy stack, but making sure infrastructure stays reliable and can provide the correctness our customers demand while scaling to a global service.