Senior Cloud Ops Engineer, Bellwether

About X, the Moonshot Factory
X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Our goal: 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. We approach projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research with the speed and ambition of a startup.
About the Team:
Our team – Bellwether – operates at the intersection of machine learning, geospatial data, and pressing issues with enterprise customers, governments, and more. We focus on severe weather manifestations of climate change, such as wildfires, and aim to use a wide range of data and analytics to better understand and predict what these events could mean for communities and businesses across the globe. We do this through the detection and classification of the features and patterns of the natural and built worlds, the application of cutting-edge machine learning, and the redesign of the full geo-ML workflow. This work extends into development and production-level work as well, as Bellwether also has a number of products that are live with customers. The result: tools and models that allow a range of industries to better leverage earth observation insights.
About the Role
We are seeking a Cloud Operations Engineer to lead technical vision and implementation of internal and multi-customer cloud infrastructure. In this role you will have the opportunity to drive architecture decisions that bridge teams across platform engineering, cloud operations, and product delivery. You will also support internal developer experience by automating operations such as CI, scaling analysis workflows, and ensure our cloud infrastructure maintains enterprise grade security, reliability, and cost management.
Your technical vision will extend beyond the near-term sprint contributions. It will guide long-term multi-year roadmaps, mentor and establish standards across the engineering teams, and champion operating procedures to proactively manage incident responses.
About the Role
We are seeking a Cloud Operations Engineer to lead technical vision and implementation of internal and multi-customer cloud infrastructure. In this role you will have the opportunity to drive architecture decisions that bridge teams across platform engineering, cloud operations, and product delivery. You will also support internal developer experience by automating operations such as CI, scaling analysis workflows, and ensure our cloud infrastructure maintains enterprise grade security, reliability, and cost management.
Your technical vision will extend beyond the near-term sprint contributions. It will guide long-term multi-year roadmaps, mentor and establish standards across the engineering teams, and champion operating procedures to proactively manage incident responses.
How you will have 10X impact:
Architect, deploy, and manage scalable, high-throughput, low-latency, and multi-region cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.
Lead structural initiatives across cloud providers, focusing on microservices, serverless patterns, and zero-trust security controls.
Build and maintain self-service Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that allow software engineering teams to provision, test, and ship code securely and autonomously.
Streamline CI/CD pipeline capabilities, reducing build-to-deploy cycle times while enforcing compliance, guardrails, and security scanning.
Eliminate team friction through advanced orchestration, custom cloud operators, and robust automation tooling..
Champion end-to-end system visibility by designing unified observability frameworks incorporating metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and continuous profiling.
Define and implement robust Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets across core microservices.
Serve as an escalation authority for critical production incidents, driving root-cause analysis (RCA) and blameless post-mortem actions to eliminate repeat failure modes.
Establish continuously monitored FinOps practices—driving visibility into cloud spending, workload unit economics, capacity planning, right-sizing, and committed use reservation strategies.
Design and enforce automated right-sizing, lifecycle policies, committed use/reservation strategies, and continuous cost optimization patterns.
Partner with engineering leaders to establish resource allocation models and cost attribution tags without compromising performance or speed.
What you should have:
Master's degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
Industry experience in core cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and (preferably) container orchestrators (Kubernetes).
Industry experience with infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform) across multiple environments.
Experience with networking fundamentals (VPCs, BGP, Service Mesh, DNS, CDN) and modern cloud security.
Direct experience managing high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure architectures handling millions of daily requests or petabytes of data.
Expertise in distributed systems concepts, load balancing strategies, disaster recovery design, and fault isolation patterns.
Strong proficiency in Python and Typescript (bonus: Rust) to build APIs, automation tools, CLI, internal products, and system utilities.
Experience with cloud-native telemetry toolsets, such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog.
Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and rapidly pivot in a startup-like, high-risk research environment.
It’d be great if you also had these:
Early startup or 0-to-1 build experience.
Production-level experience in the geospatial domain working with earth observation datasets, geospatial pipelines, and geo-ML workflows.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $174,000 - $261,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.