Senior Space 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.
- Build operator-grade mission-control UIs and dashboards for integration, testing, and on-orbit operations.
- Create flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests for avionics, GNC, and operations teams.
- Design and productionize mission-platform tooling, including service templates, artifact management, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, observability, and deployment pipelines.
- Implement robust deployments across lab benches, test stands, and mission networks, including safe rollout and rollback strategies for air-gapped or limited-connectivity environments.
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 logging, metrics, tracing, 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 UIs.
Benefits
- Salary range is $169,067–$216,031 per year, with eligibility for stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
- This is an on-site role in El Segundo, California.
- The company provides work involving spacecraft, mission platforms, flight software, and in-house space vehicles.
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.