Flight Software Architect
The Exploration Company4 days ago
Munich, GermanyStaff+
Responsibilities
- Define, develop, and maintain the overall spacecraft flight software architecture, including software components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models.
- Drive architectural decisions, design principles, technical standards, and best practices while providing technical guidance to software engineers.
- Coordinate software interfaces and integration across avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communications, and other spacecraft subsystems.
- Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
- Address fault tolerance, timing, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, safety, performance, and spacecraft reliability in architectural decisions.
- Identify and mitigate architectural risks, evaluate trade-offs, and support design reviews, integration campaigns, verification, and validation activities.
- Align multidisciplinary engineering teams and communicate architectural decisions, constraints, and trade-offs to technical teams and project stakeholders.
Requirements
- 10–15 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience in flight software, embedded software, or safety- and mission-critical systems.
- Proven experience defining and evolving software architectures for complex critical software systems, ideally in spacecraft, launch vehicle, satellite, or aerospace applications.
- Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software, operating systems, hardware-software interfaces, resource-constrained computing, and distributed or fault-tolerant systems.
- Experience translating system-level requirements into software architectures, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
- Understanding of software integration, testing, verification and validation, and configuration and change management in complex engineering environments.
- Experience with architectural trade-off analysis, technical risk management, and engineering decisions under performance, reliability, schedule, and resource constraints.
- Ability to collaborate across engineering disciplines and align stakeholders around clear technical solutions.
- Strong structured thinking, analytical skills, technical communication, ownership, and pragmatic problem-solving abilities.
Benefits
- Relocation assistance is provided for candidates willing to relocate.
- Visa sponsorship is provided where applicable.
- Equal opportunity employer with a stated commitment to diversity.
- Collaborative environment focused on rapidly advancing and democratising space exploration.
Categories
About The Exploration Company
The Exploration Company designs and builds Nyx, a reusable cargo spacecraft for in‑orbit transportation and Earth return, selling mission services to commercial and institutional customers. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Gauting, Bavaria, the privately held company focuses on logistics to and from low Earth orbit and beyond. It flew a reentry technology demonstrator on Ariane 6’s inaugural launch in 2024 as a step toward operational missions.