Director, Global Services, Space Program Engineering

Spire Space Services leverages this infrastructure and experience to help companies and governments use space to solve environmental, social, security, and business challenges on Earth. With our proven space platform, global ground station network, end-to-end manufacturing facility, and extensive launch partnership network, Spire Space Services handles the entire mission from idea to in-orbit operations, and helps our customers deploy innovative applications in space, at maximum speed with minimum risk. Using our platform, Spire customers can deploy applications to space as simply as they deploy applications to the cloud.

Global Services Engineering at Spire Global is foundational to unlocking new capabilities for satellite software development. Global Services comprises of two teams – Core Infrastructure and Data Platform. The Core Infrastructure team provides the internal developer platform that 20+ teams use to test, deploy, and operate services on AWS in compliance with our security controls. Data Platform provides the shared infrastructure for Data, AI and ML that teams use to organize, share, query, and process data at petabyte scale. 

Our ideal candidate will have considerable soft skills as well as strong hands-on technical abilities. An individual who can think strategically to identify opportunities to grow & innovate as well as roll up their sleeves and get into the trenches at code level with the team to solve critical technical problems and maintain a clear technical standard excellence for our code and people. This role requires considerable Stakeholder management; thus, the ideal candidate would require having excellent written as well as verbal communication skills, ability to translate complex technical topics into simple, easy to understand language that can be understood across all non-technical audiences in the Company including Product Management, QA, pre-Sales, Sales, Marketing teams etc. Building roadmap, socializing solutions, encouraging adoption, and supporting our internal customer teams are table stakes. Confident individual with a cool temperament would fit in well, especially if they can empathize with our developers when challenges arise. 

The Role: 

As the Engineering Director, you will be responsible for making sure the technical vision of the team is aligned with business priorities and implemented on time and on quality. This includes supporting the bottom-up ideation, creation, and curation of technical proposals which is core to Spire’s culture, roadmap management and backlog grooming. Last but not the least, shaping the Infrastructure & Data Platform teams to meet Spire's commitments into the future.  

As a Technical Leader, you will need to constantly guide, mentor, and drive your teams to meet Company goals & objectives while making sure that the team stays happy & motivated. 

Basic qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience  
• 10+ years of work experience in related Industry 
• 5+ year leading engineering teams. 
• Developing and deploying distributed applications on AWS ecosystem 
• Hands-on experience with data engineering software for batch and stream processing at a scale of billions of events per day and petabytes of data stored such as like Spark, Flink, Kafka, EMR, Databricks, Snowflake, etc. 
• Hands on experience with Infrastructure as code approach to maintaining an internal development platform for a large cloud environment (tens of teams)
• Experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and current systems
• Experience working in a modern cloud environment ideally AWS
• Proficiency with common cloud networking architectures
• Experience writing high quality code in some compiled programming language such as Go, Rust or Java and some interpreted programming language such as Python.
• Enjoy working as part of a cross-functional customer-centric team.
• Ability to and interest in taking on and driving tasks to completion on your own.
• Strong writing skills and the ability to communicate and present different positions in documents and other communication channels.
• Have in-depth knowledge of API design principles and best practices, caching strategies, and designing for resiliency and scalability.
• Familiarity with advanced analytics including ML and AI is a plus 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Certified AWS Solution Architect and/or Certified Kubernetes Administrator or similar experiences 
• Understanding of Security and operational standards and regulations 
• Experience with continuous delivery tooling and methodologies 
• Operational understanding of modern distributed systems
• Familiarity with Export Control Trade regulations
• Can lead technical architecture discussions and help drive design decisions within your team 

Tools and Technologies Expertise 

• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Concourse CI, GitHub actions, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, Terraform, Python. 
• Data platform: Hadoop, Hbase, OpenSearch, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Go, Java, SQL, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery 

 

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in office.

Access to US export controlled software and/or technology may be required.

The anticipated base salary range for this position is $190,000 to $220,000. Final base salary for this role will be based on the location, skills, experience and qualifications. In addition to base compensation, this role may be eligible for annual equity awards and our employee benefits program, including vacation, sick, and personal time off; optional medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverage; a 401(K) plan; health and wellness reimbursement program; and participation in Spire’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.  #LI-DC1