Senior Mission Software Engineer
Varda Space Industries6 hours ago
El Segundo, CA, USASenior
Base Salary
$169k - $216k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
- Build operator-grade mission-control UIs 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 tooling, including CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, and observability.
- Develop deployment patterns and safe rollout/rollback strategies for lab benches, test stands, mission networks, and air-gapped or limited-connectivity environments.
- Work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission operations.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, mathematics, 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 language concepts.
- Strong systems fundamentals in concurrency, networking, performance, and reliability.
- Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services with low-latency messaging and time-series or relational stores.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Experience with logging, metrics, and tracing for end-to-end observability.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.
- Preferred: proficiency in C++, Ansible, and/or NiceGUI; experience with DAQ, closed-loop control, flight-software testing and simulation tools, safety-critical requirements and certification artifacts, ground-system standards, mission-network security, and mission-grade UIs.
Benefits
- Fully on-site role in El Segundo, California.
- Flexible PTO and 12 paid holidays.
- Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents, with FSA and employer-matched HSA options.
- Voluntary accident, hospital, critical illness, and pet insurance.
- $120/month wellness reimbursement and sponsored One Medical memberships.
- 12 weeks of parental leave plus family-building and parenting benefits.
- Stock options and/or long-term cash awards; 401(k) with a 6% immediately vested employer match.
- $20 per pay-period cell phone reimbursement and relocation support for new hires if needed.
- Daily lunch, twice-weekly dinner, team events, happy hours, mission celebrations, and complimentary EV charging.
About Varda Space Industries
Varda Space Industries builds and operates in-orbit manufacturing platforms and reentry capsules so pharmaceutical and materials companies can produce goods in microgravity and return them to Earth. The company designs its W‑Series vehicles in-house, including pharmaceutical processing payloads, capsules, heat shields, and satellite buses, and sells manufacturing and reentry services to commercial customers. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in El Segundo, California, it also has offices in Washington, DC and Huntsville, Alabama.