Staff Flight Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design and develop flight software for spacecraft and telescope command, control, and data handling systems.
• Build software interfaces for hardware components, sensors, and onboard subsystems.
• Architect highly reliable, fault-tolerant software for long-duration autonomous operation.
• Implement telemetry, command uplink/downlink, and system coordination communication protocols.
• Collaborate with electrical and hardware engineers on software and physical-system integration.
• Support hardware bring-up, integration, debugging, testing, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop activities, and system validation.
• Develop fault detection, isolation, and recovery mechanisms.
• Participate in design reviews such as PDR and CDR and contribute to internal documentation.
• Provide engineering support during integration, testing, and system validation.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent.
• At least 5 years of experience in software engineering, embedded systems, or systems-level development.
• Strong programming skills in C, C++, or similar low-level languages.
• Experience developing software for embedded or hardware-integrated systems.
• Understanding of real-time systems, concurrency, performance optimization, communication protocols, and networking fundamentals.
• Strong debugging, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Passion for aerospace, robotics, or complex systems.
• Preferred experience with spacecraft, satellite, or aerospace flight software.
• Preferred familiarity with RTOS, embedded Linux, fault-tolerant design, reliability engineering, hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation environments, and CCSDS space communication standards.
• Preferred basic scripting or automation experience with Python or MATLAB for testing or data analysis.

Benefits

• Flexible work environment with office or hybrid work and remote work part of the week; Los Angeles employees must work at least 3 days per week in the office.
• Unlimited paid time off and paid holidays.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with 100% of employee premiums paid by the employer.
• Stock option opportunities.
• Access to current hardware and software tools.