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Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (Application Software) Verified today

SpaceX · Hawthorne, CA · Production · first seen 2026-07-24

Role Overview

The application software team is the central nervous system of SpaceX. You will build mission-critical platforms that accelerate vehicle software delivery, testing, and operations for every Falcon 9, Starship, and Dragon mission, while powering Starlink's global growth.

This position has a meaningful impact on Starship by significantly reducing safety-critical build and test times for vehicle software. You will design and operate the tools that enable rapid iteration, rigorous testing, and reliable deployment of code that launches rockets and connects satellites.

What You Will Do

  • Deploy, upgrade, operate, maintain, and scale mission-critical products and services
  • Manage infrastructure as code and use modern observability tools to provide complete visibility of application health
  • Collaborate with software engineers to design highly operable, maintainable, and testable systems
  • Improve the entire software development lifecycle from inception through deployment and continuous refinement
  • Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems
  • Provide high-quality support to vehicle software engineers
  • Participate in the team's on-call rotation
  • Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through measurement and creative engineering

Basic Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or engineering discipline; OR 3+ years of professional SRE or DevOps experience
  • 1+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
  • Experience with Linux operating systems

Preferred Skills and Experience

  • Build systems (Bazel, Buck, Make, etc.)
  • Container and virtualization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, vSphere, QEMU, KVM, etc.)
  • Databases and data modeling (Postgres, MySQL, ClickHouse, etc.)
  • Infrastructure as code tools for managing server fleets
  • Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or similar automation frameworks
  • Understanding of technologies that underpin modern cloud infrastructure, with ability to translate high-level concepts into implementations from first principles
  • Ability to work with mission-critical and sensitive systems with appropriate urgency and care
  • Effective communication with customers, peers, and management
  • Full-stack development experience (team uses Python, JavaScript, C#; end users primarily use C++)

Additional Requirements

  • Must be able to work extended hours and weekends as needed

Compensation

Level I: $125,000.00 - $160,000.00 per year
Level II: $145,000.00 - $195,000.00 per year

Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis based on job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience.

Base salary is one part of your total rewards package. You may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of company stock, stock options, or long-term cash awards, as well as potential discretionary bonuses and Employee Stock Purchase Plan discounts. Benefits include comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, 401(k) retirement plan, short and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, paid parental leave, 3 weeks of paid vacation, and 10 or more paid holidays per year. Paid sick leave accrues pursuant to company policy.

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder), Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering at SpaceX | Flight Proven Space