Platform DevOps Engineer

Sophia Space is a venture-backed deep technology company building high-performance, energy-efficient computing systems designed to operate in orbit. Our work sits at the intersection of aerospace systems, advanced computing, and applied physics, supporting early customers and partners across defense, intelligence, and commercial space markets.
We are currently at the Seed stage, scaling our engineering organization and lab infrastructure as we move from technical validation into early commercial deployments. The company is headquartered in California, with primary engineering and lab operations based in Southern California. Over the coming year, Sophia will continue expanding its team, maturing internal systems, and relocating to a new lab facility during the summer.
**Team:**
Platform & Infrastructure
**Hiring Authority:**
Software Lead
**Role / Title:**
Platform DevOps Engineer
**Level:**
Senior (Individual Contributor)
**Employee Type:**
Full-time
**Need Date:**
ASAP
**Priority:**
High
**Location:**
Pasadena, CA (local required; hybrid schedule)
**Interviews with:**
Lee Thomason, Eric Anderson
**Additional Notes:**
Senior IC role owning platform infrastructure, deployment automation, and operational foundations for hardware-backed distributed systems.
Job Description
Design, build, and evolve the infrastructure and automation that underpin Sophia Space’s customer-facing platform for running distributed workloads on hardware-backed systems. This role focuses on provisioning, deployment, and lifecycle automation that connect CI/CD systems, containerized workloads, and physical compute environments into a reliable, repeatable operational platform.
Primary Responsibilities

• Own the design and implementation of platform provisioning and deployment infrastructure.
• Design and implement templating and provisioning mechanisms for customer and internal environments.
• Integrate the customer-facing platform with CI/CD workflows targeting bare-metal and hardware-backed systems.
• Build and evolve deployment, update, rollback, and recovery mechanisms that support safe platform evolution.
• Manage container image lifecycle, deployment artifacts, and runtime configuration.
• Ensure platform changes are observable, reversible, and operationally safe.
• Collaborate closely with distributed systems, security, and hardware-adjacent engineers to align infrastructure with system constraints.
• Contribute to the definition of operational best practices for a small, high-trust engineering team.

Required Skills

• 7+ years of professional experience in platform, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Demonstrated ownership of production infrastructure and deployment systems.
• Strong experience as a senior Platform / DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems.
• Hands-on experience with container runtimes and container image lifecycle management (build, distribution, versioning, rollback).
• Experience operating systems in high-reliability environments where failure modes, recovery, and observability are critical.
• Familiarity with update and rollback strategies for distributed or partially connected systems.
• Strong Linux systems fundamentals.

Desired Skills

• Experience with access control, identity, or credential automation.
• Background working in environments where software and hardware constraints must be jointly considered.
• Comfort working with bare-metal or hardware-backed systems rather than fully managed cloud services.