Staff Software Systems Engineer

Role Overview

Reax is hiring a Staff Software Systems Engineer to own the software systems that connect embedded flight software, ground applications, human-machine interfaces, and supporting test infrastructure. This role exists to turn COTS applications, custom software, and evolving system requirements into reliable, maintainable software that works under real operational constraints: compute limits, latency, usability, regulatory expectations, integration risk, and compressed timelines. The timeline will shape the scope as much as the technical specification, so this person must be able to make disciplined tradeoffs without producing fragile systems or poor user interfaces.

This person will be expected to define architectures, select tools and components, write software, integrate with hardware, support test operations, evaluate compliance paths, and make explicit trades against schedule, cost, reliability, maintainability, usability, and performance. The role requires a multidisciplinary engineer who can move between low-level embedded concerns and system-level operational outcomes without losing ownership of either.

Required Qualifications

• Experience delivering simple, maintainable software in highly regulated or high-consequence environments such as aerospace, automotive, financial systems, defense, or other safety- or mission-critical domains on aggressive schedules.
• Comfort working with embedded software, including C/C++ as a typical implementation language.
• Ability to reason across the full stack, including embedded software, ground software, networking, data flows, user interfaces, test environments, and operational workflows.
• Ability to design software that can support FAA experimental tickets, military airworthiness, or similar regulatory regimes without defaulting to slow, overbuilt, or obsolete practices.
• Practical understanding of how software affects the human-machine interface and UX/UI, including operator workload, clarity, failure modes, and confidence in use.
• Ability to work deeply with hardware, avionics, flight sciences, operations, and test teams to ensure the integrated system meets program intent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with DO-178, military airworthiness, FAA experimental certification, or comparable software assurance standards.
• Experience delivering software with user-interface patterns from military-style games, real-time strategy games, flight simulation, menu systems, or other high-density operator interfaces.

Reporting Structure and Scope

This role reports to the Founder and CEO and is based onsite in San Diego.

The engineer is the responsible engineer for the software subsystem and is expected to act as both technical owner and product owner for that scope. This includes development, integration, and test of embedded flight software, ground software, human-machine interfaces, and supporting software infrastructure. The role does not initially include direct reports but requires coordination with other engineers across the vehicle as well as management of vendors and subcontractors.

The position combines subsystem technical ownership with programmatic responsibility. The engineer is expected to develop the subsystem in a scrappy and iterative manner while maintaining the level of technical clarity, analytical rigor, and professionalism required to support internal decision-making and external customer confidence.