Principal DevOps Engineer / Head of DevOps Systems

Ready to make connectivity from space universally accessible, secure, and actionable? Then you’ve come to the right place!

At E-Space, we’re focused on bridging Earth and space with the world’s most sustainable low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network. We’re a team of bold thinkers, ambitious leaders and dynamic doers—and we’re disrupting NewSpace by fundamentally changing the design of legacy LEO space systems to deliver entirely new satellite capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

We’re intentional, we’re unapologetically curious and we’re 100% committed—to saving space, to protecting our planet and to turning connectivity into actionable intelligence.

We are seeking an experienced Principal DevOps Engineer to lead the unification and standardization of development workflows across a large, multi-team engineering organization. This role will design, implement, and enforce a cohesive DevOps framework that integrates containerized development, company-wide code review and testing standards, and AI-assisted development methodologies. The objective is to ensure every engineering team—across all business units—develops, tests, and deploys software through a consistent, secure, and scalable process.

What you will be doing:

• Standardization and Governance Define and maintain a unified DevOps framework and documentation used across the organization. Standardize container workflows for creation, storage, and retrieval across all development teams. Establish consistent methods for saving and managing development data, ensuring traceability and reproducibility.
• Automation and Tooling Build and maintain company-wide CI/CD pipelines integrating automated testing, code quality checks, and deployment automation. Develop and manage standardized container templates and base images for internal use. Manage infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi.
• Code Reviews and Quality Assurance Implement and enforce organization-wide code review policies ensuring code quality, security, and maintainability. Integrate automated unit, integration, and regression testing into all CI/CD workflows.
• AI-Integrated Development Lead adoption of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, CodeWhisperer), enabling developers to use their preferred assistants within governed frameworks. Create policies and infrastructure to safely incorporate AI into code generation, documentation, and testing. Collaborate with data and platform teams to manage AI training data and integrate feedback loops.
• Cross-Team Coordination Partner with engineering managers to align DevOps standards with project requirements. Oversee company-wide container registries, shared repositories, and test frameworks. Mentor and coordinate DevOps engineers embedded within product teams.
• Monitoring and Continuous Improvement Track operational metrics such as build time, test coverage, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery. Continuously improve internal toolchains and DevOps practices to enhance developer efficiency and product reliability.

What you bring to this role:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Platform Engineering.
• 3+ years in a senior or leadership role supporting 100+ engineers. Must be able to demonstrate direct DevOps leadership on commercially deployed, complex software systems, preferably supporting high-rate production code teams in active enterprise or SaaS environments.
• Significant hands-on experience with C++ and Rust, including build systems, dependency management, and containerization for large-scale production applications. Expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD platforms (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar). Strong understanding of automated testing, code review workflows, and security automation.
• Proven experience integrating AI tools into enterprise software development pipelines. Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Excellent technical documentation and cross-functional communication skills.

Extra bonus points for the following:

• Experience unifying disparate development environments into standardized container-based workflows.
• Familiarity with internal developer platforms (IDPs) or DevEx initiatives.
• Understanding of AI data governance and compliance practices.
• Prior experience implementing GitOps and managing artifact or container registries (Harbor, ECR, GCR, etc.).

$0 - $0 a year

This is a full time, exempt position, based out of our Saratoga office. The target base pay for this position is $100,000 - $185,000 annually. The total compensation packaged will be determined by various factors such as your relevant job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

We are redefining how satellites are designed, manufactured and used—so we’re looking for candidates with passion, deep knowledge and direct experience on LEO satellite component development, design and in-orbit activities. If that’s your experience – then we’ll be immediately wow-ed.

E-Space is not currently able to provide employment sponsorship for candidates who do not hold work authorization for the location of this role.