IT DevOps Engineer

Overview

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 2026.

We are part of a stepping‑stone approach to continuous human presence in LEO and are looking for talented people who want to help us achieve this vision.

IT Dev Ops Engineer reporting to the Manager, IT Infrastructure. Full‑time, exempt position located in Long Beach.

You will have the opportunity to build a modern IT infrastructure from the ground up, focusing on cloud‑first systems, research and deployment of the latest technologies, and improving speed, security, and ease of use. The role includes planning, building, testing, delivering, and maintaining projects from start to finish, while balancing security and employee productivity.

• 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 Git Ops (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.

• 3+ years experience designing, deploying, and managing highly available self‑hosted security services such as a SIEM.
• 2+ years of experience building modern Dev Ops tools and best practices: CI/CD systems, deployment tools (Cloud Formation, Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
• Deep expertise with the cloud and Kubernetes.
• Understanding of networking, security, and authentication constructs and requirements.

• Experience with Kubernetes security (RBAC, Pod Security, 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.

Base salary will vary based on knowledge, education, and experience. Pay range: $140,000 – $307,000 USD. Full‑time employees also receive company equity and a full suite of benefits, including 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, disability and life insurance, 401(k) retirement plan, One Medical membership, Class Pass credits, personalized mental healthcare through Spring Health, and additional perks.

Meals and snacks are provided at no cost, and lunch is subsidized.

Vast is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Vast 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, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status.

Hiring for this position requires U.S. export control compliance. Applicants must either be a U.S. person as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.62 or otherwise qualify for deemed export licensing (green card holders, asylees, refugees, etc.). U.S. export compliance status will be verified during the application process.