Vantor is seeking a Direct Access Facility Operations Engineer (DOE) to join our Direct Access Remote Sensing (DARS) organization. The DOE team's mission is to ensure successful operations and continuous improvement of Vantor's Direct Access programs supporting U.S. Government, Defense, Intelligence, and Commercial customers.

The DOE contributes to this mission by managing, monitoring, automating, and optimizing operations for Direct Access Facility (DAF) customers and their ground stations, enabling reliable access to some of the world's most advanced Earth observation satellite systems. The role serves as a critical bridge between customer operations, headquarters mission systems, engineering teams, and fielded DAF infrastructure. At Vantor, operational excellence is driven by automation, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and engineering innovation. We continuously improve reliability, throughput, cybersecurity, and scalability while leveraging AI-enabled tools and Vantor headquarters systems to accelerate troubleshooting, enhance situational awareness, streamline workflows, and improve mission outcomes. This position combines real-time operational support with systems engineering, automation development, AI-assisted analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives to ensure mission success across a distributed global architecture.

Responsibilities

• Provide timely support to 24x7 operations teams, including participation in on-call rotations.

• Maintain operational services by monitoring availability, performance, latency, capacity, and overall system health.

• Serve as the technical owner of Vantor Direct Access Facility services and support the onboarding and integration of new DAF customers.

• Utilize Vantor headquarters systems, mission management tools, operational dashboards, telemetry platforms, and enterprise support applications to monitor and manage DAF operations.

• Employ AI-enabled operational tools, predictive analytics, anomaly detection systems, and intelligent automation capabilities to improve operational efficiency and accelerate issue resolution.

• Lead operational readiness activities for new customer deployments, software releases, infrastructure upgrades, and mission capabilities.

• Act as a liaison between System Engineers, Software Developers, Account Managers, Customer Success teams, and 24/7 operations personnel.

• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing, and operationalization of new DAF customer capabilities within the Vantor ground system architecture.

• Develop and maintain automation solutions that improve reliability, reduce operational burden, and increase system scalability.

• Analyze operational data and system performance trends to identify opportunities for process improvement and mission optimization.

• Support configuration management, software deployment, validation testing, and cross-site integration activities.

• Participate in the complete service lifecycle-from requirements and design through deployment, operations, sustainment, and continuous improvement.

• Practice sustainable incident management, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortem methodologies.

• Effectively communicate technical and operational information to customers, leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Support cybersecurity, compliance, and best operational practices across customer-facing and headquarters systems.

Minimum Requirements

• Must be a U.S. Citizen and willing and able to obtain and maintain a Secret Security Clearance.

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field. Four additional years of relevant experience may be substituted for a degree.

• Minimum of 2 years of experience supporting operational systems, mission systems, ground systems, software systems, or related technical environments.

• Strong troubleshooting and analytical problem-solving skills.

• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced operational environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in operations engineering, mission operations, satellite ground systems, network operations, or related technical support roles.

• Experience troubleshooting complex distributed systems and implementing long-term corrective actions.

• Experience utilizing AI-powered operational tools, machine learning-assisted analytics, intelligent automation platforms, or generative AI technologies to improve operational performance and decision-making.

• Experience developing automation solutions using Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go, Java, C++, or similar programming languages.

• Experience supporting applications running in Linux and/or UNIX environments.

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and services, including AWS, Azure, or hybrid cloud architecture.

• Experience supporting headquarters mission systems, remote ground station operations, or geographically distributed operational environments.

• Experience with observability platforms, telemetry systems, monitoring tools, log analytics, and performance dashboards.

• Understanding of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Microservices, containerized applications, and modern software deployment practices.

• Experience supporting CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps workflows, and software release management processes.

• Knowledge of networking, cybersecurity principles, and secure system operations.

• Ability to interface with unique customer requirements across diverse and evolving operational environments.

• Demonstrated curiosity, initiative, and commitment to continuous learning in complex system-of-systems environments.

• Experience supporting cross-site software deployment, validation testing, and operational acceptance activities.

• Experience supporting services deployed through a CI/CD pipeline

Pay Transparency: To support pay transparency, Vantor includes salary ranges in all U.S. job postings. Starting pay for this role will fall within the listed range and will be based on factors such as experience, qualifications, skills, location, and market conditions. Candidates who meet the minimum requirements for the role should not expect to receive compensation at the top of the range. The listed range reflects the expected pay for this position, and final offers will be determined based on each candidate's experience, expertise, and alignment with the role.
• The base pay for this position within Colorado is: $90,000.00 - $120,000.00 - $132,000.00 annually.

For all other states, we use geographic cost of labor as an input to develop market-driven ranges for our roles, and as such, each location where we hire may have a different range.

Benefits: Vantor offers a competitive total rewards package that goes beyond the standard, including a robust 401(k) with company match, mental health resources, and unique perks like student loan repayment assistance, adoption reimbursement and pet insurance to support all aspects of your life. You can find more information on our benefits at: https://www.Vantor.com/careers
Additionally, this position is incentive eligible with a target based on contribution, company performance, and/or individual results achieved; the specific incentive plan and target amount will be determined based on the role and breadth of contributions.

The application window is three days from the date the job is posted and will remain posted until a qualified candidate has been identified for hire. If the job is reposted regardless of reason, it will remain posted three days from the date the job is reposted and will remain reposted until a qualified candidate has been identified for hire.

The date of posting can be found on Vantor's Career page at the top of each job posting.

To apply, submit your application via Vantor's Career page.