Summary
Orbitworks, a joint venture between Marlan Space and Loft Orbital, builds and operates satellites and space missions. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will maintain and scale ground-segment infrastructure and support test and space operations in a hybrid cloud environment. Responsibilities include Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, automation and CI/CD, observability, networking, systems administration, and reliability improvements. The role is based in Abu Dhabi; GCP, Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki experience are among the stated technical requirements or preferences.
The posting
As published on loftorbital.com. Pulled from the employer's site and shown as they wrote it.
About the Role:
Orbitworks is revolutionizing access to space by building reliable, shareable satellites that drastically reduce the time and complexity traditionally required to get to orbit. We operate satellites, fly customer payloads, and handle entire missions from end-to-end. Orbitworks is a joint venture between Marlan Space (UAE-based) and Loft Orbital.
As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on our Infrastructure Team, you’ll play a pivotal role in maintaining and scaling our ground segment infrastructure. You’ll collaborate across development, operations, and IT to ensure the integration, delivery, and reliability of services that support our test infrastructure and our space operations on Earth and in orbit.
This is an exciting opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology and help build modern automated space infrastructure. This is not your typical SRE role, we apply DevOps principles even to spacecraft control.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with developers, test engineers and satellite operators to foster a strong SatDevOps culture.
- Design and roll-out cloud solutions for our testing and operations infrastructure. Find the best trade-offs between existing and additional cloud resources to scale and help Orbitworks achieve its mission.
- Design, implement, and maintain scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment.
- Improve our developer and test engineers experience by building better tools, workflows, and environment to streamline
- Lead efforts to automate and optimize systems, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning (IaC), and deployment workflows for test on the ground and operations in space.
- Own and evolve our observability stack (metrics, tracing, logs) to improve usability and performance. Grafana-centric ecosystems are a plus.
- Implement and advocate for best practices in software reliability, fault tolerance, and performance tuning.
- Proactively identify, investigate, and resolve system reliability issues, performing root cause analyses and implementing long-term fixes.
- Partner with teams to design and operate Software Defined Network (SDN) solutions.
- Contribute to a collaborative and inclusive team culture where respectful debate and continuous learning are celebrated.
- Initially, handle and manage the link between cloud and network/software/hardware infrastructure. Assume I&T (Information technology) responsibilities as much as necessary to start with.
Must Haves:
- Strong experience with public cloud infrastructure, ideally GCP.
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes, architecture, deployment, ops, and resource optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to design and build scalable, highly available systems.
- Familiarity with Software Defined Networking (SDN) concepts and tools.
- Experience implementing and maintaining observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, etc.).
- Proficiency in at least one backend language: Go, Python, Rust, C/C++, or Java.
- Deep understanding and hands-on experience with DevOps practices: CI/CD, infrastructure as code (IaC), and automation.
- Proven track record of working in fast-paced, high-growth technical environments.
- Strong networking knowledge (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs, secure networks).
- Deep experience in Systems Administration.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to operate independently with a proactive, results-driven mindset.
- Strong communication skills; thrives in a multicultural, cross-functional team.
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on experience with GitOps frameworks (ArgoCD, FluxCD).
- Interest or experience in FinOps and cost-optimized architectures.
- Understanding of orchestration in resource-constrained environments, like space systems.
- Knowledge of infrastructure as code frameworks (Terraform, Ansible or similar)
- Knowledge of systems engineering tools and SDLC governance.
- Cybersecurity Awareness.
- Familiarity with security practices, vulnerability scanning, threat detection, risk mitigation.
Orbitworks' mission is to make space simple for organizations that want to deploy physical and virtual missions to space. Building on Loft Orbital's heritage, Orbitworks will be the first commercial firm in the United Arab Emirates to mass-manufacture satellites. Orbitworks aims to manufacture tens of satellites annually and operates out of a 50,000-square-foot facility in Abu Dhabi.