Senior Software Engineer (Remote Sensing) (Arlington)

Senior Software Engineer (Remote Sensing) | Satellite Operations | On-site in Arlington, VA (5 days/week)

My client is a U.S. space technology company that builds and operates its own commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite constellation. Their data supports national security and intelligence work, and it also gets used for disaster response and scientific research.

They're growing the Remote Sensing software group and need a senior backend engineer for the ground systems behind their autonomous satellite operations. You'd take ownership of production services for mission planning, scheduling, command, control, and communications. A small group of engineers carries a lot of that load today, so a big part of this job is spreading ownership around and making the systems more resilient. They want someone who owns services end to end and can lead technically.

What you'll work on

- Build and maintain backend services, APIs, and data workflows for satellite mission planning, scheduling, and command and control

- Share ownership of critical production services

- Weigh in on architecture with an eye on reliability, scalability, and security

- Work with operations, platform engineering, and flight software teams on end-to-end delivery

- Improve observability, testing, and deployment processes

- Take part in the on-call rotation

What they're looking for

- BS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

- 5+ years building highly available backend services, ideally in Python

- 3+ years designing, building, and testing commercial RESTful APIs

- Experience in aerospace ground systems, satellite or mission operations, command and control, or another complex operational environment

- Solid grasp of software architecture, event-driven microservices, interface design, and automated testing

- 2+ years building automated build and test pipelines in CI/CD

- Relational databases, PostgreSQL preferred

- Kubernetes and Docker containerized services

- AWS or another cloud platform

- Application security, access control, authentication, and identity management

Nice to have

- Software that automates space operations

- Scheduling systems, optimization algorithms, or automated planning

- Infrastructure monitoring and observability

- API design and documentation with Swagger/OpenAPI

- Mentoring or improving how a team works

Benefits

Stock options, 401k with a 3% non-elective company contribution, employer-funded medical, dental, vision, life, and disability, flexible time off, free lunch in the office every day, and free parking.