Ground Systems Software Engineer II
Varda Space Industries6 hours ago
El Segundo, CA, USAMid Level
Base Salary
$144k - $184k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, commanding, 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 tooling, including service templates, artifact management, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and self-service workflows.
- Create deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, mission networks, and air-gapped or limited-connectivity environments, including safe rollout and rollback strategies.
- Work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF and ground systems, and mission operations.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software.
- At least 3 years of experience developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
- Expertise developing in Python and strong understanding of its 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 data 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.
- Proficiency in C++, Ansible, and/or NiceGUI is preferred.
- Preferred experience includes DAQ and closed-loop control, flight-software-integrated CI/testing/simulation/data tools, safety-critical requirements and certification artifacts, ground-systems standards, mission-network security, and mission-grade UIs.
Benefits
- Flexible PTO, 12 paid holidays, and company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance with FSA and employer-matched HSA options.
- Voluntary accident, hospital, critical illness, and pet insurance, plus a $120/month wellness reimbursement.
- 12 weeks of parental leave, family-building and parenting benefits through Maven Clinic, and sponsored One Medical memberships.
- Stock options and/or long-term cash awards, a 401(k) plan with a 6% immediately vested employer match, and a $20/pay-period cell phone reimbursement.
- Relocation support for new hires if needed.
- Fully stocked kitchen with lunch daily and dinner twice weekly, team events, happy hours, mission-success celebrations, and complimentary EV charging.
- Full-time, on-site work in El Segundo, California.
Tech Stack
Categories
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.