Flight Software Engineer
Flight Software Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area
We’re working with an early-stage aerospace company developing a new generation of compact, high-performance spacecraft. The team is building differentiated satellite technology designed to improve the scalability, reliability and economics of deploying and operating satellite constellations.
They are looking for a Flight Software Engineer to join a highly technical, multidisciplinary engineering team and help develop the software stack responsible for operating the spacecraft.
This is a hands-on position with significant technical ownership, working across flight software, embedded Linux, spacecraft interfaces, controls and hardware integration.
Responsibilities:
- Spacecraft reliability, including observability instrumentation, designing test systems to expose bugs, fixing bugs, and introducing/modeling best practices for reliable software.
- Product interface development, including designing clean interfaces for payload and ground interactions.
- Developing software interfaces with a product mindset, where the interfaces themselves are considered part of the product.
- Cross-functional software engineering across radio, data management, attitude control and system safety.
- Applying software engineering practices that limit complexity within task-oriented, modular systems.
- Developing and evolving the flight software service stack responsible for operating the spacecraft.
Ideal Experience:
- 3+ years of experience building taskable software stacks, such as web servers or comparable systems.
- Experience with service-based architectures.
- Experience designing software-to-software and software-to-human interfaces.
- Experience with Linux drivers and the /dev interface.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- A bias towards simplicity and maintainable software.
Desirable (experience with some of the following would be beneficial):
- Docker.
- Rust and/or Python.
- MQTT and RPC.
- Serialization technologies such as Protobuf or FlatBuffers.
- Embedded Linux and hardware/software interfaces.
- Spacecraft flight software or satellite systems.
- Spacecraft mission concepts, including operations planning and attitude control.
- Attitude Determination and Control (ADC) concepts, mathematics or systems.
- IoT, robotics, autonomous systems or backend/distributed software controlling physical systems.