Network Automation Engineer (Starshield)

About the position

SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars. Starshield leverages SpaceX's Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads. The Starshield team is building highly reliable in-space mesh networks, designing secure systems to guarantee access to space, designing next-gen communication and sensing software, and more. As a Network Automation Engineer you will help create the tooling to expand and monitor the Starshield service provider network. You and your teammates will own the design and implementation of these tools and monitoring strategies all while continually improving existing processes and tools. You will be helping provide visibility into a network that supports critical national security missions and will be challenged to maintain critical systems and services.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, upgrade, operate/maintain, and scale a global networking service to government customers.
• Closely collaborate with software engineers to create highly operable and maintainable infrastructure.
• Measure, maintain, and improve the uptime and performance of the terrestrial network.
• Act as technical product owner for infrastructure tools and software used in the ground network (Access, Backbone and Edge Networks).
• Innovate ways to scale with automation and operational improvements.
• Provide mentorship to junior engineers.
• Participate in the on-call rotation.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, or science discipline; OR 2+ years of professional network automation, DevOps, network engineering, or site reliability engineering experience in lieu of a degree.
• Experience with networking protocols, their application and traffic types: TCP/IPv4/IPv6, gaming, voice, video, broadcast, streaming.
• Experience with Linux operating system.
• Automation experience in Python, Shell, Bash, and/or other languages.

Nice-to-haves

• Comfortable working with mission critical and sensitive systems, with a sense of urgency appropriate to the responsibilities.
• Understanding of carrier and service provider networks.
• Experience with hands-on work in bringing up network infrastructure.
• Experience with automatically managing dozens or hundreds of network assets.
• Experience with Puppet, Ansible, or other automation frameworks.
• Ability to run projects independently.
• Excellent communications skills with the ability to communicate with customers, peers, management etc. in both formal and informal situations.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana and other monitoring tools.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret or Top Secret SCI clearance.

Benefits

• Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package at SpaceX.
• You may also be eligible for long-term incentives, in the form of company stock, stock options, or long-term cash awards.
• Potential discretionary bonuses and the ability to purchase additional stock at a discount through an Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Access to comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Access to a 401(k) retirement plan.
• Short and long-term disability insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Paid parental leave.
• Various other discounts and perks.
• Accrue 3 weeks of paid vacation.
• Eligible for 10 or more paid holidays per year.
• Employees accrue paid sick leave pursuant to Company policy.