Full Stack Developer - Internal Tooling

Northwood Space · Torrance

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About Northwood:

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company bringing the benefits of space to the masses through advanced communications technology. We are building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions such as national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. With a vertically integrated approach, Northwood designs, builds, and rapidly deploys scalable systems that power the next generation of space missions. If you like solving complex challenges and seeing your work deployed around the world with real impact, Northwood is the place to do it.

Role

Northwood engineers and operators run hardware and software across a global network of antenna ground stations and the cloud services behind them. No one sells a platform for running a network like this at scale, so Northwood builds its own.

Platform Engineering builds the software that takes Northwood products from first prototype to full operation. That covers how code is built, tested, and released, how every site and service is monitored, and how hardware in remote locations is brought online, updated, and kept healthy. The problems span CI and release, observability, hardware operations, developer tooling, and security, and every one of them has to work across every site, service, and customer at once.

Few organizations get to build this kind of software in house. What this team builds will shape how a global network of antennas is operated for the missions that depend on it. Every new antenna, site, and customer Northwood adds runs on this platform, and it sets how fast the network can grow. The work includes simulated ground stations and lab test benches running real hardware, where each release is tested against realistic conditions before it reaches a live site.

We're looking for a Software Engineer on the Platform team to design and build this software end to end, from backend services and automation to the interfaces people use every day. The role is broad, across backend, frontend, CI/CD, infrastructure, and security, and you'll own major parts of the platform.

We look for people who fix problems they find even when they aren't theirs, move quickly from question to working result, hold their own work to a high bar, take hard feedback well, and want more responsibility than they have today.

Responsibilities

You'll work across these areas and own more of them over time.

• Delivery: Build the CI and release systems that take code from commit to production in the cloud and at sites around the world, safely and repeatably.

• Testing and simulation: Build simulated ground stations, lab test benches with real hardware, and test data replay, and wire them into the release path so releases are tested before they go live.

• Observability: Build the monitoring, logging, and alerting that let engineers and operators see the health of every service and site, and act on it.

• Hardware operations: Automate how new sites are brought online, configured, updated, and kept healthy, in locations with few or no people on site.

• Self-service tools: Build the tools and web interfaces engineers and operators use to create, ship, and run software without waiting on another team.

• Security by default: Build identity, secrets management, least-privilege access, and audit into the platform, so every service gets them without extra work.

• Infrastructure: Define the cloud and site infrastructure the platform runs on as code, so it is reviewed, versioned, and repeatable.

• Developer environments: Build fast local development, a preview environment for each change, and safe access to cloud and site systems.

• Ownership: Own what you ship in production: monitoring, on-call for your systems, and fixing root causes.

• Working with users: Gather requirements directly from the engineers and operators who use the platform, write clear design docs, ship in small steps, and take part in design and code reviews.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, writing production code in at least one general-purpose language (such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or Java).

• Has built backend services or APIs (such as REST or gRPC) that other systems or people depend on.

• Hands-on experience with several of the following, or their equivalents:

  • CI/CD pipelines (such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins)

  • Containers and container orchestration (such as Docker and Kubernetes)

  • A cloud platform (such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure)

  • Infrastructure as code (such as Terraform or CloudFormation)

  • Relational databases (such as PostgreSQL or MySQL)

  • Linux and the command line

• Has owned a service, tool, or platform from design through production, with other engineers or users relying on it, including working through at least one hard problem along the way (such as a difficult production bug, a design under real constraints, or a significant migration).

• Has written technical documents other engineers used, such as design docs, RFCs, or runbooks.

Preferred Qualifications

Strong candidates bring depth in a few of these. No one has all of them.

• Depth in a systems or backend language (such as Rust, Go, or Python), or equivalent.

• Built web applications end to end, from the API to the interface, with a modern frontend framework (such as React, Vue, or Angular).

• Built developer platforms, internal tools, or self-service infrastructure that other engineers relied on.

• Cut friction for other engineers and measured whether it worked, such as faster onboarding, fewer support requests, or higher adoption.

• Designed CI/CD pipelines or release systems that ship to many environments or locations, including GitOps-style deployment (such as Argo CD or Flux).

• Deployed and operated services on Kubernetes or an equivalent, with packaging tools (such as Helm).

• Built test infrastructure, such as simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, test data replay, or shared test harnesses (such as pytest-based frameworks).

• Ran production systems with metrics, logs, and dashboards (such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog), including on-call and incident response.

• Worked with identity and access (such as Okta or Auth0), secrets management (such as HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager), or regulated environments (such as AWS GovCloud).

• Managed fleets of on-premises or edge servers, including declarative configuration (such as Nix, Ansible, or Puppet).

• Exposure to hardware, embedded, RF, or space systems.

Additional Information:

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

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Northwood Space is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood 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.

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