Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer
Varda Space Industries1 day ago
El Segundo, CA, USASenior
Base Salary
$169k - $216k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding with deterministic behavior for real-time operations and post-flight analysis.
- 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, test harnesses, and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks.
- Design and productionize mission-platform software, including service templates, artifact management, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and self-service tooling.
- Implement deployment patterns, phased rollouts, rollback strategies, and limited-connectivity or air-gapped deployments across labs, test stands, and mission networks.
- Collaborate hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, GNC, and mission operations teams.
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 fundamentals in concurrency, networking, performance, and reliability.
- Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services using low-latency messaging and time-series or relational stores.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, infrastructure-as-code, logging, metrics, and tracing.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.
- Preferred experience with C++, Ansible, NiceGUI, DAQ, closed-loop control, flight-software-integrated testing and simulation tools, safety-critical certification artifacts, ground-systems standards, mission-network security, and mission-grade command-workflow UIs.
Benefits
- On-site role in El Segundo, California.
- Flexible PTO, 12 paid holidays, company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, FSA and employer-matched HSA options.
- Wellness reimbursement, parental leave, family-building and parenting benefits, and sponsored One Medical memberships.
- 401(k) plan with a 6% immediately vested employer match, cell phone reimbursement, incentive equity and/or long-term cash awards, and relocation support if needed.
- Stocked kitchen with daily lunch and twice-weekly dinner, team events, 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.