Senior Platform Engineer

K2 is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, unlocking performance levels previously out of reach across every orbit. Backed by $450M from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alpine Space Ventures, and others – 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.

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.

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. If you are a motivated individual who thrives in a fast-paced environment and you're excited about contributing to the success of a groundbreaking Series C space startup, we’d love for you to apply.

The Role

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.

As we continue to grow, we’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer on our Enterprise Information Systems team, you must possess strong technical skills and a sense of empathy for your fellow developers. You will work closely with other talented engineers, architects and senior stakeholders to design, implement, and deliver on our roadmap.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Distills Kubernetes & cloud networking (identity, routing, segmentation, exposure) into clear, lightweight abstractions that cut cognitive load for product teams

• Claims ownership of hard connectivity challenges end‑to‑end, including design, rollout, adoption, and lifecycle producing solutions with company‑wide impact

• Practices surgical precision in feature development, delivering high value while avoiding complexity that delays or bloats

• Delivers work permeated with excellence including readable code, automated tests, clear documentation, consistent maintenance, and polished observability

• Intuitively understands packet flow, service identity, and secure communication with a keen ability to simplify them

• Understands the importance of resilience and reliability in production operations and upgrades

Responsibilities And Accountabilities

• Design and evolve self‑service connectivity abstractions enabling scoped segmentation, governed exposure, adaptive ingress/egress, and traceable traffic

• Own service identity & trust (mTLS, cert automation, least‑privilege east‑west, governed egress) with broad coverage and low friction

• Engineer resilient traffic paths (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, failure isolation) and harden them via chaos tests, automated remediation, and MTTR reduction

• Establish observability standards so end‑to‑end request path and applied policies are visible (source, identity, route, outcome, saturation, cost) across environments

• Provide approachable docs & diagnostics (guides, diagrams, ‘why can’t this connect?’ flows) to shorten support loops

• Optimize performance & cost (latency budgets, cross‑AZ transfer, IP consumption, LB efficiency) and act on anomalies

• Apply threat & abuse modelling to connectivity surfaces (API exposure, egress, identity propagation) using industry principles while keeping solutions developer‑friendly

• Steward lifecycle and adoption including versioning, safe migrations, deprecations, usage telemetry, and proactive pruning of unused resources

• Mentor engineers and partner with adjacent DevX teams to embed networking abstractions into golden paths, raising organizational fluency and consistency

• Own, operate, and maintain network related infrastructure within and adjacent to EKS

Qualifications And Experience

• BS/MS in Computer Science (or equivalent) and 8+ years of experience building and operating distributed/platform systems with production Kubernetes/EKS ownership

• Proficiency in at least one language (Go, TypeScript, Python, Java) and disciplined SCM workflows (branching, reviews, automated gates)

• Solid grounding in cloud + Kubernetes networking, for example VPC & subnet layout, routing, east-west segmentation, service exposure, DNS/CoreDNS, policy enforcement, and CNI behaviour

• Practical service trust & identity knowledge such as mTLS, certificate automation/rotation, PKI/CA or SPIFFE/SPIRE concepts

• Working understanding of traffic resilience & performance: timeouts, retries, backoff, circuit breaking, rate limiting, failure isolation, latency and saturation analysis

• Experience with developer connectivity abstractions: K8s CRDs/operators, guardrails (admission, lint, simulation) and automated tests

• Competence in observability & SLOs (metrics, tracing, structured logs, L4/L7 telemetry, end‑to‑end request path, visibility into applied policies, SLI/SLO definition & enforcement)

• Experience with infrastructure as code and delivery: Terraform or CDK, GitOps (Argo/Flux), progressive/canary rollouts, policy-as-code integration

• Operational experience: chaos/fault injection, component upgrades (CNI, proxies, cert issuers), incident response

• Ability to communicate and mentor on networking & identity across varied fluency levels

• Working knowledge of eBPF / Cilium Hubble or Envoy extensions is an asset

• Exposure to Gateway API or service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, ambient), multi region failover, IPv6/dual stack planning is an asset

• Comfort with advanced DNS/discovery (split horizon, conditional forwarding), policy engines (Kyverno/OPA), API inventory & cost attribution metadata is an asset

Compensation and Benefits:

• Base salary range for this role is $165,000 - $215,000 + equity in the company

• Salary will be based on several factors including, but not limited to: knowledge and skills, education, and experience level

• Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical/dental/vision/ coverage, life insurance, paid parental leave, and many other perks

If you don’t meet 100% of the preferred skills and experience, we encourage you to still apply! Building a spacecraft unlike any other requires a team unlike any other and non-traditional career twists and turns are encouraged!

If you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

Export Compliance

As defined in the ITAR, “U.S. Persons” include U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (i.e., Green Card holders), and certain protected individuals (e.g., refugees/asylees, American Samoans). Please consult with a knowledgeable advisor if you are unsure whether you are a “U.S. Person.”

The person hired for this role will have access to information and items controlled by U.S. export control regulations, including the export control regulations outlined in the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). The person hired for this role must therefore either be a “U.S. person” as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.15 or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export control license.

Equal Opportunity

K2 Space is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with K2 Space is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.