Staff Flight Software Engineer
Observable Space2 months ago
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.
About Observable Space
Observable Space builds vertically integrated optical systems and software that let satellites and spacecraft see, navigate, and communicate. Its products span ground-based telescopes and stations, in-space sensor payloads, and free-space laser communications, paired with embedded compute, cloud orchestration, and developer APIs. The privately held company is headquartered in Los Angeles and manufactures in-house, selling hardware and supporting software to satellite operators, space agencies, defense users, and research institutions.