Senior Mission Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
• Build operator-grade mission-control interfaces and dashboards for integration, testing, and on-orbit operations.
• Create flight-software simulations, device emulators, scenario-based automated tests, and test harnesses.
• Design and productionize mission-platform services, CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tooling.
• Deploy software across lab benches, test stands, and mission networks using safe rollout, rollback, and limited-connectivity strategies.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software.
• At least 5 years of experience developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
• Expertise in Python and strong understanding of concurrency, networking, performance, and reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services with low-latency messaging and time-series and relational stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, infrastructure-as-code, logging, metrics, tracing, Docker, Kubernetes, release management, phased rollouts, and controlled networks.
• Preferred qualifications include proficiency in C++, Ansible, or NiceGUI; experience with DAQ, closed-loop control, flight-software testing and simulation, safety-critical certification artifacts, ground-system standards, mission-network security, and mission-grade UIs.

Benefits

• Salary range is $169,067-$216,031 per year, with eligibility for stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
• This is an on-site role in El Segundo, California.
• Employees must meet Varda's U.S.-person requirement for access to export-controlled technology.