Jeff Bezos
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and one of his Blue Origin rockets. (Blue Origin Photo)

According to two recently deleted job postings on the internet, where nothing can ever really be deleted, Amazon Web Services is hiring technical engineers to develop cloud services for satellites and “space-based systems.”

TJI Research spotted the listings, which called for a software engineer and product manager to “to help innovate and disrupt the launch, satellite and space world with new AWS products, services and features,” according to one of the job ads, for “a new AWS service that will have a historic impact.” The ad for the engineer said it was recruiting “software development experts who want to be part of a big, audacious space project!”

And the ad for product manager described the mission as such:

These products will provide high bandwidth and low latency solutions for networking launch vehicles, aggregating satellite systems, inter-connecting space system networks, and enabling management and monitoring of all satellite control network devices and critical data center infrastructure. As a leader within this new business line, you’ll join other thought leaders to work hard, have fun, and make history building new space services.

This is interesting! Links to the posts on Amazon.jobs are no longer working, but the URLs, Google’s cache, and LinkedIn all confirm that AWS was, and probably still is, hiring for a new team working on space services.

Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is a serious space geek, for sure. But this would also signal that the commercial satellite market is really coming into its own, generating enough real-time data to require services from AWS to help process and manage it all.

It could also be AWS gearing up for space and satellite work on behalf of the government or military, given the job’s location in Herndon, Virginia, near AWS’s massive US East data center complex. The Department of Defense is considering bids from cloud companies for a ten-year $10 billion cloud computing contract, and that is likely to involve some work with space systems.

The new applicants would appear to be joining a team “responsible for bringing all forms of space into Amazon’s massive-scale data center networks” with one member already working on the project. Matt Stapf, an engineer with a long career in the satellite communications industry, joined AWS just last month, possibly in response to an old job listing quoted above.

Applicants are required to maintain an active top-secret security clearance with a polygraph test according to the ads, and it’s likely that someone in Amazon human resources is getting a lesson in op-sec at the moment.

(GeekWire’s Alan Boyle contributed to this report.)

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