Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer
Varda Space Industries6 hours ago
El Segundo, CA, USASenior
Base Salary
$169k - $216k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain high-reliability telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding services.
- 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 deployment infrastructure, artifact management, service templates, simulation frameworks, and observability capabilities.
- Develop deployment patterns for lab, test, and mission environments, including safe rollout, rollback, and limited-connectivity approaches.
- Work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF and 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 developing 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 using low-latency messaging and time-series and relational stores.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
- End-to-end observability experience with logging, metrics, and tracing.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.
- Preferred experience with C++, Ansible, or NiceGUI; DAQ and closed-loop control; flight-software-integrated CI, testing, simulation, and data tools; safety-critical requirements, testing, and certification artifacts; ground-systems standards; mission-network security; and mission-grade UIs.
Benefits
- On-site work in El Segundo, California.
- Eligible for incentives in the form of stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
- Employment requires U.S. person status because of access to export-controlled technology.
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.