Role highlights:

• Senior Platform Engineer
• Location: Valencia, Spain
• Department: Signal Processing
• Reports to: Engineering Manager, Signal Processing
• Employment type: Permanent
• Workplace model: Hybrid (3 days per week in office)
• Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required)

Why this role matters:

As the first dedicated Platform Engineer for ICEYE's newly forming Signal Processing and Acquisition Planning teams, you will build the infrastructure foundation that two critical engineering teams depend on to deliver next-generation satellite intelligence capabilities. From Kubernetes environments and deployment pipelines to networking, secrets management, and on-premises deployment patterns, you will own the full platform stack — designing it from day one to work equally well in the cloud and in customer-controlled, off-cloud environments. This is a greenfield role with real stakes: the infrastructure decisions you make now will shape how these teams operate for years, directly underpinning a capability that contributes to the defence of Europe.

Who We Are

ICEYE delivers space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to governments and allied nations. This includes sovereign and turnkey ISR missions leveraging ICEYE’s world-leading synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology, as well as access to data from the world’s largest SAR satellite constellation. These capabilities enable partners to detect and respond to critical changes anywhere on Earth with unprecedented speed and accuracy, day or night and in any weather, supported by ultra high-resolution imagery and high-frequency revisits.

As a trusted partner for defense, intelligence, security, and maritime domain awareness, ICEYE’s near real-time data creates a tactical advantage for mission-critical operations. Designed for dual use, the platform also serves civil protection and commercial users for natural-catastrophe intelligence, insurance, maritime monitoring including oil-spill detection, and finance, contributing to global security and community resilience.

ICEYE is headquartered in Finland and operates globally across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We have more than 900 employees, united by a shared vision: improving life on Earth by becoming the global source of truth in Earth Observation.

Your day-to-day responsibilities

• Container environments and compute infrastructure. Kubernetes clusters, resource management, networking, storage, access control, and compute capacity that teams can build on. You own the environments, you keep them healthy, and you design them with an on-premises-first approach from day one, even if we also run them in the cloud.

• Deployment and environment tooling. Reproducible, reliable deployment pipelines. Infrastructure-as-code that teams can understand and extend. Environments that can be spun up, torn down, and updated without drama.

• On-premises environments. Everything we build will eventually run in customer environments that are not cloud-based. This constraint shapes infrastructure choices from the start: portable deployments, well-defined infrastructure contracts, and clean separation between what the platform provides and what the applications consume. You will design the infrastructure so that the stack works the same on-premises as in the cloud.

• Networking and access management. Service-to-service communication, ingress, network policies, secrets management, and the access control patterns and services that keep things secure without slowing teams down.

• Whatever comes next. GPU compute provisioning for signal processing workloads, security hardening, integration with IceOS platform services, or capabilities that emerge as the teams grow. You will help define what the infrastructure becomes.

What we’re looking for

Must haves:

• Strong infrastructure and platform engineering fundamentals. You have built and operated the infrastructure that other teams depend on. You understand what it means to be a platform team: your users are engineers, your SLAs are their productivity, and your failures cascade. You have opinions about how to do this well, grounded in experience.

• Container orchestration in production. You have designed, deployed, and operated Kubernetes or equivalent environments in production. You understand networking, storage, resource management, and the operational realities of keeping these environments healthy. This is the core of what you will own.

• Infrastructure-as-code and deployment automation. You have built reproducible infrastructure with tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent. You know how to make deployments safe, fast, and predictable. You have seen what happens when infrastructure drifts, and you know how to prevent it.

• On-premises and hybrid deployment experience. You have shipped software to environments you do not control. You understand the difference between running in your own cloud and running on customers’ premises, and you have designed infrastructure that works in both.

• AWS experience. Production experience with AWS services: EKS, VPC, IAM, S3, and the networking and identity patterns that underpin cloud infrastructure.

• Networking and security fundamentals. You understand service-to-service communication, network policies, ingress, TLS, secrets management, and access control. You can design infrastructure that is secure by default without becoming a bottleneck.

• Production mindset. You know how to instrument systems so that problems are visible before they become incidents. Metrics, structured logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards are tools you have used to keep systems healthy, not just checkboxes.

• Ability to work from ambiguity. You will be the first infrastructure engineer in a forming organisation. There is no playbook. You need to assess what two different teams need, prioritise ruthlessly, and deliver the highest-impact work first.

• Effective communication across domains. You will work with signal processing engineers, software engineers building tasking applications, and product managers with operational intelligence backgrounds. You can listen carefully, translate between contexts, and build trust with all of them.

• AI advocacy. You understand that AI is restructuring how knowledge work is done and that early, decisive adoption creates compounding advantages. You view mastering AI collaboration as a core engineering competency, not an optional extra.

Nice to haves:

• Data engineering and workflow orchestration. You have experience designing and operating data processing pipelines in production: job scheduling, workflow engines (Airflow, Argo Workflows, Prefect, or similar), and the infrastructure around ingestion, transformation, and delivery of data reliably.

• Experience as an early or first infrastructure hire. You have stood up infrastructure capability from scratch in a growing engineering organisation. You know how to balance building foundations with unblocking teams that need to ship today.

• Proficiency with AI development tools. You actively use AI assistants (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) in your daily engineering work. Not tentatively, but as a primary tool for writing, reviewing, and iterating on code and infrastructure.

• GPU compute and heterogeneous workloads. Experience provisioning and managing GPU-accelerated compute environments for signal processing, scientific computing, or similar workloads.

• Security engineering in regulated environments. Experience hardening infrastructure and translating security requirements into practical engineering controls. Familiarity with defence or intelligence sector security standards is a plus.

Application Process

• TA Partner Screen Call
• Hiring Manager Interview
• Technical Interview
• Values & Fit Interview
• SVP of Engineering Interview

Working at ICEYE

At ICEYE, you’ll join a diverse and highly engaged team united by the ambition to make the impossible possible. As a global scale-up, we combine speed and ambition with the opportunity to take real ownership from day one. Your growth, wellbeing, and success are a priority, with continuous professional development, training opportunities, and a culture where collaboration is how we win.

How We Work (Our Values)

Make the impossible possible: We set ambitious goals and stay calm under pressure. We bring grit, optimism, and ownership when things get hard, and we keep moving until we find a way.

• Be curious: Go deep, ask questions, listen carefully, and think critically. Understand the why behind decisions.
• See the big picture: Stay close to what’s happening across the company so you can make better decisions. Consider how your work affects others.
• Drive effective teamwork: Create psychological safety, invite different perspectives, and build inclusive teams. There are no bad questions.
• Act as one team: We win together. We match tasks to the right owner and stay agile as priorities shift.
• Have fun: What we do matters and it should be enjoyable. Celebrate progress, take pride in results, and share the wins.

Benefits

Our benefits are designed to support your health and wellbeing, at work and beyond. We keep improving them based on employee feedback, and offerings vary by location. Talent Acquisition will confirm what applies for this role and location during the process.

Base salary range for this position is 6 000 - 8 000 € per month (gross), depending on experience, and will be negotiated individually.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We want ICEYE to be a place where people can be themselves and do great work. Different backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger, which is why we work to create an environment where people feel included, respected, and able to speak up. Whatever your background, we want you to bring your authentic self to the table.

We’re committed to fair, inclusive hiring and equal opportunity. Everyone is welcome to apply. If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, tell us and we will do our best to help.

Apply now to start your ICEYE journey and help us continue to make the impossible possible together. Read more about ICEYE and working with us at iceye.com.