Flight Software Engineer — San Francisco Bay Area

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.