Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems

Job Description

Job Description

Power the future of Space at Star Catcher

Star Catcher is building the first energy grid in space to power the orbital economy.

Today's spacecraft must generate all of their own power, which caps what they can do and how long they can operate. But what if they could "plug" into a grid, the way buildings do on Earth? Instead of cables and outlets, Star Catcher is building the technology to wirelessly beam energy to spacecraft's existing solar panels when and where they need it.

Be an early member of a team building an entirely new energy infrastructure at scale to power the next frontier.

Star Catcher Industries, Inc. , located in Jacksonville, Florida , has an opportunity for a  Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid. 

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain ground segment tools, dashboards, and test infrastructure supporting hardware bring-up and build tracking.
• Work closely with cross-functional members of the engineering organization to develop and evaluate interfaces between ground tooling, hardware, and flight software.
• Develop APIs, services, and data pipelines connecting ground systems, test benches, and engineering tools under established architecture.
• Support development of telemetry ingestion, processing, and visualization tooling, including decommutation and time-series storage of spacecraft health and status data.
• Support command planning and validation tooling under established architecture and safety constraints.
• Support integration and test campaigns with automated test and data-processing tooling, including hardware-in-the-loop test benches.
• Participate in design and architecture reviews across the software development lifecycle.
• Document software architecture, APIs, and operational procedures.
• Build and maintain unit/integration tests for CI/CD.

Basic Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: 5+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, or engineering tooling).
• Proficiency in one or more of Python, C++, Go, or similar languages.
• Experience with databases, (especially TSDB) and REST/gRPC APIs.
• Comfortable working across the stack, from backend services to internal tooling and UIs.

Technical Expertise

• Working knowledge of containerization (e.g., Docker) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with message queues or pub/sub systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ) for real-time data handling.
• Exposure to telemetry/command data formats and processing (e.g., CCSDS, XTCE, or similar).
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows.

Desired Skills

• Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems.
• Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with spacecraft or other aerospace systems.
• DevSecOps and test automation experience using Python or similar languages.
• Familiarity with release engineering and configuration/change management practices.
• Familiarity with network storage, Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand.
• Working knowledge of authentication schemes (e.g., RADIUS, LDAP) for access-controlled ground tooling.

Help us deploy and scale space infrastructure that will drive our utilization of space forward! We offer a highly competitive benefits package including access to comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement plan, life insurance, and paid parental leave, in addition to other benefits.

Star Catcher is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Star Catcher is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

All offers of employment at Star Catcher are contingent upon results of a thorough background check and your ability to provide proof of eligibility to work in the US.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.