Senior Software Engineer - Core Platform Infrastructure

Application close date:

Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the requisition is closed.

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. Join our team of problem solvers as we add new chapters to the history of spaceflight! 

This role is part of Enterprise Technology (ET), where we’re developing the digital infrastructure needed to build the road to space, with an emphasis on digital capabilities required to advance Blue Origin’s mission. Enterprise Technology is the center of excellence for digital technology at Blue Origin, providing oversight and governance to align technology and business strategies.

About the Role

We're a team of collaborators, doers, and problem-solvers relentlessly committed to a culture of safety and innovation. This position will directly impact the history of space exploration and requires your dedication and keen attention to ensure safe and repeatable spaceflight. Join us in lowering the cost of access to space, fulfilling Blue Origin's vision of millions living and working in space to benefit Earth.

This is a platform infrastructure role. You'll build and operate the thing that builds the thing, and you'll help decide where it goes next.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help lead our Core Platform Infrastructure team. We own and operate the Kubernetes clusters that the rest of the company deploys onto. We also build the paved road that gets teams there: reusable Kustomize configurations, GitLab CI/CD pipeline templates, and Terraform modules that other teams adopt to build, ship, and run their own services. We don't own those services. We own the cluster underneath them and the templates and guardrails that make deploying to it fast, consistent, and safe.

As a senior engineer on this team, you'll set technical direction for major parts of the cluster and the paved road. You'll lead designs from problem framing through production, and you'll raise the bar for the engineers around you. Our customers are other engineering teams across Blue Origin, so the leverage is enormous: every improvement to a template or cluster capability multiplies across everyone who builds on it. Blue Origin relies heavily on Kubernetes for rapid software development and deployment. This role requires deep, hands-on experience running Kubernetes clusters in production, meaning operating the platform itself and not just deploying onto it. If you want to shape how a company builds and ships software, and you have the operational scars to do it well, this is your team.

How We Build

We build with an AI-assisted mindset, using tools like Claude Code, Codex, and other leading AI assistants to move faster, think bigger, and tackle harder problems. AI is a first-class part of how we design, automate, debug, and review here. As a senior engineer, you'll help set the team's norms for using AI tooling responsibly, with a clear eye on production reliability, security, and governance. The best engineers on our team don't just use AI. They know when to trust it, when to question it, and when to override it, and they teach others to do the same.

Platform Scale & Impact

The clusters we operate and the templates we publish underpin how software is built, shipped, and run across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and mission operations. When we improve a pipeline template or a cluster capability, that improvement lands for every team that builds on it. We keep raising the bar on the paved road: reusable delivery pipelines, resilient container platforms, and observability that teams inherit by default. At this scale, reliability and scalability aren't aspirational. They're the baseline. The infrastructure you design and lead directly determines how fast Blue Origin moves.

What You'll Work With

• Languages: Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python

• Cloud: AWS and cloud-native services

• Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes, containerd, Docker, Kustomize

• Infrastructure as Code & GitOps: Terraform modules, Flux

• Policy & Cluster Security: Kyverno policy-as-code, RBAC, network policy

• CI/CD: GitLab pipeline templates and delivery automation

• Observability: Datadog (metrics, centralized logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerting)

• Networking: Kubernetes networking (CNI, ingress, DNS); AWS VPC fundamentals

• Operating Systems: Linux

• AI Tools: Claude Code, Codex, and equivalent AI-assisted development tools

• Source Control & Collaboration: Git, code reviews, design reviews

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Set technical direction for major areas of the cluster and the paved road. Author and drive the design documents that define how we build, upgrade, secure, and scale the platform.

• Lead cross-cutting initiatives end to end, such as cluster upgrades, multi-tenancy and isolation models, template major versions, and GitOps or policy rollouts. Break them into deliverable work and see them through to adoption.

• Make and document architectural trade-offs, considering reliability, security, cost, and the experience of the teams who build on the platform.

• Influence the team roadmap with the engineering manager and Principal Engineers by identifying the highest-leverage investments and the risks we need to retire.

Cluster & Paved-Road Engineering

• Own and operate the Kubernetes clusters that teams across the company deploy onto, including capacity, upgrades, security, and multi-tenancy.

• Design, build, and evolve the reusable templates that make up the paved road: Kustomize bases and overlays, GitLab CI/CD pipeline templates, and Terraform modules, delivered and continuously reconciled through GitOps (Flux).

• Define and enforce cluster guardrails as policy-as-code (Kyverno). This covers multi-tenancy boundaries, security baselines, and safe defaults that consuming teams inherit automatically.

• Run the templates as a product. Own their versioning strategy, deprecation and migration paths, documentation, and feedback loops with consuming teams, with backward compatibility as a default.

• Evaluate, configure, deploy, scale, and administer the open source and commercial software that powers the cluster and the paved road.

Reliability & Operations

• Own the reliability of the cluster and shared tooling across their lifecycle, from design through operation and refinement.

• Define the signals that matter for cluster health (availability, capacity, saturation, and SLOs where they make sense) and make sure the team acts on what the data shows.

• Serve as a senior responder in on-call and incident response for cluster- and platform-level incidents. Lead incident coordination when needed, drive root cause analysis, and run blameless postmortems that produce lasting systemic fixes. The cluster sits in the critical path of every team that deploys on it, so its reliability is non-negotiable.

• Establish observability standards and build them into the templates so consuming teams inherit them by default.

Automation & Developer Experience

• Drive sustainable scaling of the platform through automation, and steadily reduce toil for both our team and the teams we serve.

• Design self-service capabilities and paved-road defaults that let other teams deploy quickly and safely without hand-holding or manual intervention.

Engineering Excellence

• Write well-tested, maintainable code, and set the quality bar through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices.

• Take on the hardest problems across the stack, from cluster and control-plane behavior to pipeline configuration and network paths, and make them understandable to others.

• Define team standards, runbooks, and documentation that raise the technical bar across the team.

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through pairing, design and code review, and stretch opportunities. Help them build the operational judgment this work demands.

• Partner with Principal Engineers, the engineering manager, and product managers to shape and deliver the team's roadmap.

• Work cross-functionally with the teams that build on our platform to understand their needs, translate them into platform capabilities, and drive adoption.

• Represent the platform in cross-team design reviews and technical forums, and earn trust as the go-to voice on Kubernetes and delivery infrastructure.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience across software development, infrastructure engineering, and production operations.

• Deep, hands-on experience operating and administering Kubernetes clusters in production, not merely deploying workloads onto them. This includes cluster lifecycle and upgrades, node and control-plane management, RBAC and multi-tenancy, cluster networking (CNI, ingress, DNS, network policy), add-ons and controllers, and resource and quota management.

• A track record of leading the design and delivery of significant infrastructure initiatives, from technical proposal through production rollout and adoption.

• Experience with GitOps-based delivery (e.g., Flux or Argo CD) and policy-as-code enforcement (e.g., Kyverno or OPA/Gatekeeper).

• Experience authoring and maintaining reusable infrastructure as a product (Terraform modules, Kustomize configurations, and CI/CD pipeline templates that other teams consume), including versioning, deprecation, and migration strategies.

• Hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native infrastructure, including core networking (VPC, subnets, security groups).

• Demonstrated ability to analyze and troubleshoot complex distributed systems.

• Significant experience running production systems on-call, including leading incident response, driving blameless postmortems, and building observability (metrics, logging, and distributed tracing).

• Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, or .NET), and openness to working in the languages we use day to day (Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python).

• Experience mentoring other engineers and raising the bar through design and code reviews.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, with sound judgment about when to trust, question, or override what they produce.

• Strong communication skills. You can explain complex technical concepts clearly to engineers and non-engineers, drive alignment in design discussions, and own outcomes.

• Ability to earn trust, maintain positive and professional relationships, and contribute to a culture of inclusion.

• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Desired Qualifications

• Multi-cluster, multi-account, or multi-environment operations at scale.

• Experience with a service mesh such as Istio, including traffic management, mTLS, and mesh-layer observability.

• Experience designing internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure used by many teams.

• A demonstrated habit of using AI-assisted tools in your workflow, and judgment evaluating AI-generated code and configuration for correctness, security, and production readiness.

• Experience in aerospace, manufacturing, or supply chain domains is a plus but not required.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 3 months, you will:

• Ramp up on our clusters and paved-road tooling, ship meaningful template or module changes, and take primary on-call.

• Identify the highest-leverage reliability, security, or developer-experience gaps in the platform and propose a plan to close them.

• Contribute to design and code reviews across the team in a way that raises the bar.

In your first 6 months, you will:

• Own one or more major areas of the cluster or the template suite end to end, from design decisions through production operation and the experience of the teams who consume it.

• Lead a cross-cutting initiative, such as an upgrade, a policy rollout, or a template major version, from design through adoption, with measurable impact on reliability, velocity, or toil.

• Act as a senior responder in incidents and drive the systemic fixes that come out of postmortems.

In your first 12 months, you will:

• Be a trusted technical leader on the team and across the teams who build on our platform.

• Shape the team roadmap and technical standards together with Principal Engineers and the engineering manager.

• Measurably grow the engineers around you through mentorship, reviews, and shared ownership.

Why Join Core Platform Infrastructure

This is an opportunity to:

• Work at the foundation of Blue Origin's digital capability. The infrastructure you design and operate powers software delivery for the entire company.

• Operate at meaningful scale. Our platforms support engineering, manufacturing, and operations teams across Blue Origin's programs.

• Make toil disappear by replacing manual, brittle processes with self-service, automated systems that let teams across the company move faster.

• Lead in a high-craft engineering culture that values operational excellence, automation, and continuous improvement.

• Make a lasting impact, both on Blue Origin's mission and on your own path toward staff- and principal-level platform engineering.

If you're a platform-minded senior engineer who cares deeply about reliability and automation, and about building infrastructure others depend on, we want to hear from you.

Apply today and help build the infrastructure that powers the road to space.

This role is part of Enterprise Technology (ET), where we're developing the digital infrastructure needed to build the road to space, with an emphasis on digital capabilities required to advance Blue Origin's mission. Enterprise Technology is the center of excellence for digital technology at Blue Origin, providing oversight and governance to align technology and business strategies.

Base Pay Range for:

CO applicants is $181,626.00 - $254,275.35

Other site ranges may differ

Culture Statement

Don’t meet all desired requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single desired qualification. At Blue Origin, we are dedicated to building an authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every desired qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Export Control Regulations

Applicants for employment at Blue Origin must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e. current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Background Check

• Required for all positions: Blue’s Standard Background Check
• Required for Certain Job Profiles:  Defense Biometric Identification System (DBIDS) background check if at any time the role requires one to be on a military installation
• Required for Certain Job Profiles: Drivers who operate Commercial Motor Vehicles with a Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW), Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) or combination of power unit and trailer that meets or exceeds 10,001 lbs. and/or transports placardable amounts of hazardous materials by ground in any vehicle on a public road while in commerce, may be subject to additional Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations including: Driver Qualification Files, Medical Certification (obtained before onboarding), Road Test, Hours of Service, Drug and Alcohol Testing, vehicle inspection requirements, CDL requirements (if applicable) and hazardous materials transportation/shipping training.
• Required for certain Job Profiles: Ability to obtain and maintain Merchant Mariner Credential, which includes pre-employment and random drug testing as well as DOT physical

Benefits

• Benefits include:  Medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability, 401(k) with a company match of up to 5%, and an Education Support Program.
• Stock Options for all regular employees (working at least 20 hours/week)
• Paid Time Off:  Up to four (4) weeks per year based on weekly scheduled hours, and up to 14 company-paid holidays.
• Dependent on role type and job level, employees may be eligible for benefits and bonuses based on the company's intent to reward individual contributions and enable them to share in the company's results, or other factors at the company's sole discretion. Bonus amounts and eligibility are not guaranteed and subject to change and cancellation. Please check with your recruiter for more details.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Blue Origin is proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and is committed to attracting, retaining, and developing a highly qualified and dedicated work force. Blue Origin hires and promotes people on the basis of their qualifications, performance, and abilities. We support the establishment and maintenance of a workplace that fosters trust, equality, and teamwork. We provide all qualified applicants for employment and employees with equal opportunities for hire, promotion, and other terms and conditions of employment, regardless of their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin/ethnicity, age, physical or mental disability, genetic factors, military/veteran status, or any other status or characteristic protected by federal, state, and/or local law. Blue Origin will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the Washington Fair Chance Act, the California Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles Fair Chance in Hiring Ordinance, and other applicable laws. For more information on “Know Your Rights,” please see here.

Affirmative Action and Disability Accommodation

Applicants wishing to receive information on Blue Origin’s Affirmative Action Plans, or applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in the application and/or interview process, please contact us at [email protected]. Please note this is a publicly managed inbox. Please do not include any personal medical information in your request.