Senior Platform Engineer (DevX)

About the company

K2 Space is a manufacturer of large, high-power satellites.

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p class="p1">K2 is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, unlocking performance levels previously out of reach across every orbit.&nbsp;Backed by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025/12/11/this-startup-is-building-huge-satellites-for-an-underused-interstellar-sweet-spot/?ctpv=searchpage">$450M</a> from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alpine Space Ventures, and others <span class="s1">– </span>with an additional $500M in signed contracts across commercial and US government customers – we’re mass-producing the highest-power satellite platforms ever built for missions from LEO to deep space.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p> <p class="p1">The rise of heavy-lift launch vehicles is shifting the industry from an era of mass constraint to one of mass abundance, and we believe this new era demands a fundamentally different class of spacecraft. Engineered to survive the harshest radiation environments and to fully capitalize on today’s and tomorrow’s massive rockets, K2 satellites deliver unmatched capability at constellation scale and across multiple orbits.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p> <p class="p1">With multiple launches planned through 2026 and 2027, we're Building Bigger to develop the solar system and become a Kardashev Type II (K2) civilization.&nbsp;<span class="TextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0" lang="EN-US" data-contrast="auto"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0">If you are a motivated individual who thrives in a fast-paced environment and </span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0">you're</span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0"> excited about contributing to the success of a groundbreaking Series C</span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0"> space startup, </span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0">we’d</span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW79998266 BCX0"> love for you to apply.</span></span><span class="EOP SCXW79998266 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{"335559738":240,"335559739":240}">&nbsp;</span></p></div><p><strong><span data-contrast="none">The Role</span><span data-ccp-props="{"335559739":240}">&nbsp;</span></strong></p> <p><span data-contrast="none">Our enterprise software team builds the digital backbone that powers K2 Space’s satellite design, manufacturing, and mission operations. We develop tools that connect engineering, production, and mission control into a seamless ecosystem, enabling our hardware to get from concept to orbit faster than ever before.</span><span data-ccp-props="{"335559738":240,"335559739":240}">&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span data-contrast="none">As we continue to grow,&nbsp;we’re&nbsp;looking for&nbsp;</span><span data-contrast="auto">a Senior&nbsp;Platform&nbsp;Engineer on our&nbsp;Enterprise Information Systems&nbsp;team, you must&nbsp;possess&nbsp;strong technical skills and a sense of empathy for your fellow&nbsp;engineers. You will work closely with other talented engineers, architects and senior stakeholders to design, implement, and deliver on our roadmap.</span>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p> <ul> <li>Build self-service integration capability for Amazon EKS functionalities through abstractions. Enabling scoped segmentation, governed namespace, automated workload scaling, multi-tenancy, adaptive ingress/egress, and traceable traffic</li> <li>Build a consistent application deployment process to enable both AI-assisted general application development and specialized application development work</li> <li>Promote AI adoption in a secure and consistent model while supporting AI operational needs</li> <li>Establish AI guardrails, observability, and governance</li> <li>Build guardrails and out-of-the-box platform functionalities for a golden path development model, accelerating application go-live with low-friction adoption of platform tooling</li> <li>Lead long-term platform roadmap incorporating AI capabilities and AI operations</li> <li>Engineer resilient traffic paths (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, failure isolation) and harden them via chaos tests, automated remediation, and MTTR reduction</li> <li>Drive observability standards so end-to-end request paths and applied policies are visible (source, identity, route, outcome, saturation, cost) across environments</li> <li>Provide approachable docs &amp; diagnostics (guides, diagrams, “why can't this connect?” flows) to shorten support loops</li> <li>Optimize performance &amp; cost (latency budgets, cross-AZ transfer, IP consumption, LB efficiency) and act on anomalies</li> <li>Steward code lifecycle and adoption including versioning, safe migrations, deprecations, usage telemetry, and proactive pruning of unused resources</li> <li>Mentor engineers and partner with adjacent teams to embed application abstractions into golden paths, raising organizational fluency and consistency</li> <li>Build automated policies and processes to ensure good code deployment practices, code hygiene, and good code test practices</li> </ul> <p><strong>Qualifications</strong></p> <ul> <li>BS/MS in Computer Science (or equivalent) and 8+ years of experience building and operating distributed/platform systems with production Kubernetes/EKS ownership</li> <li>Comfortable performing PoCs to evaluate new technology: AI platforms, AI models, and new products</li> <li>Proficiency in at least one language (Go, TypeScript, Python, C#) and disciplined SCM workflows (branching, reviews, automated gates)</li> <li>Working knowledge of Karpenter, Istio, ArgoCD, and KEDA for Amazon EKS</li> <li>Working knowledge of CI/CD build pipelines with GitHub or GitLab</li> <li>Competence in observability &amp; SLOs (metrics, tracing, structured logs, L4/L7 telemetry, end-to-end request path, visibility into applied policies, SLI/SLO definition &amp; enforcement)</li> <li>Experience with infrastructure as code a