Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer
Varda Space Industries20 hours ago
El Segundo, CA, USASenior
Base Salary
$169k - $216k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain high-reliability telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding services 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, and test harnesses for avionics, GNC, and operations teams.
- Design and productionize self-service mission-platform tooling, including service templates, artifact management, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and deployment automation.
- Create safe deployment and rollback patterns for lab benches, test stands, mission networks, and air-gapped or limited-connectivity environments.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software.
- 5+ years of experience developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
- Expertise 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 and relational data stores.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, infrastructure-as-code, and 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-integrated tools, safety-critical requirements and certification artifacts, ground-systems standards, mission-network security, and mission-grade UIs.
Benefits
- On-site role in El Segundo, California.
- Eligible for incentives in the form of stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
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.