Software Engineer, DevOps/Infra

About Helion

We are a fusion power company based in Everett, WA, with the mission to build the world's first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity. Our vision is a world with clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone.

Since Helion's founding in 2013, we have raised over $1 billion from long-time investors such as Sam Altman, Mithril, and Capricorn Investment Group as well as new investors SoftBank and Lightspeed to propel us forward. Our last prototype, Trenta, completed 10,000 high-power pulses and reached plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (9 keV). We are now operating Polaris, our next prototype on the path to the world's first fusion power plant.

This is a pivotal time to join Helion. You will tackle real-world challenges with a team that prizes urgency, rigor, ownership, and a commitment to delivering hard truths – values essential to achieving what no one has before. Together, we will change the future of energy, because the world can't wait.

What You Will Be Doing:

As a Software Engineer focused on DevOps and Infrastructure, you will own the systems and pipelines that enable our software and firmware teams to build, test, and deploy quickly and safely. You’ll stand up and maintain cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, and build infrastructure that supports everything from operator-facing applications to firmware running on our fusion machines. You’ll help establish best practices in Git workflows, release mechanisms, containerization, and infrastructure automation. By working closely with software engineers, you’ll ensure development environments and production services are reliable, scalable, and aligned with corporate IS&T security requirements. You’ll also own critical infrastructure tools like Portainer and alerting systems, helping the team catch and resolve issues before they become blockers. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of infrastructure, tooling, and developer experience—someone who can keep our systems reliable while accelerating the pace of software delivery.

You Will:

• Stand up, configure, and maintain cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP, or similar).

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support software and firmware development.

• Manage build systems, artifact repositories, and release mechanisms for production code.

• Set up and maintain monitoring and alerting for compute infrastructure and critical services.

• Establish best practices for Git workflows, branching, and source control hygiene.

• Own containerized infrastructure management (Docker, Kubernetes, Portainer).

• Collaborate with software engineering teams to maintain and scale servers used for projects like Polaris and other machine-facing systems.

• Partner with corporate IS&T and security engineers to align infrastructure with security and compliance needs.

• Proactively identify and remove friction in the development-to-deployment pipeline to accelerate delivery.

Required Skills:

• Strong experience with Linux system administration and shell scripting.

• Proficiency in containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI).

• Strong programming/scripting ability in Python (Bash also a plus).

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, or DigitalOcean).

• Solid understanding of Git and source control workflows.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Ansible, Terraform, or similar).

• Strong collaboration and problem-solving skills across software and infrastructure teams.

Desired Skills:

• Experience with monitoring and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, Nominal, or similar).

• Familiarity with secrets management systems (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, etc.).

• Experience with paging/on-call systems (PagerDuty, OpsGenie).

• Background in software/firmware deployment pipelines and artifact management.

• Knowledge of networking fundamentals (VLANs, load balancers, reverse proxies).

• Experience with scaling CI/CD for hardware-software co-development environments.

• Exposure to compliance/security practices for production infrastructure.

• Hybrid cloud/on-prem experience

#LI-Onsite #LI-KL1

Benefits

Our total compensation package includes benefits, including but not limited to:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision plans for employees and their families
• 31 Days of PTO (21 vacation days and 10 sick days)
• 10 Paid holidays, plus company-wide winter break
• Up to 5% employer 401(k) match
• Short term disability, long term disability, and life insurance
• Paid parental leave and support (up to 16 weeks)
• Annual wellness stipend

Helion is an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the interview process, please let us know.