Senior Space Mission Software Engineer
Varda Space Industries2 days 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.
- Develop 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.
- Create deployment patterns and safe rollout and rollback strategies for laboratory, test-range, mission-network, air-gapped, and limited-connectivity environments.
- Collaborate hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF and 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 in Python and strong understanding of programming-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, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Experience with end-to-end observability, including 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.
- Experience with DAQ, closed-loop control, flight-software-integrated CI/testing/simulation/data tools, safety-critical requirements and certification artifacts, ground-systems standards, mission-network security, or mission-grade UIs is preferred.
- Must be a U.S. person eligible to access the employer's export-controlled technology without an export license.
Benefits
- On-site work 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.