Flight Dynamics Engineer — Orbit Determination & Backends

Academic Key; Toulouse; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Up to 35 days PTO

Health and life insurance

Lunch vouchers

Cross-office travel to Toulouse/San SF

Relocation assistance to Toulouse

Off-sites and team events

Job summary

Loft Orbital in Toulouse, Occitanie, seeks a Flight Dynamics Software Engineer to join the Ground Platform team. You will help scale operations for 50+ satellites and ensure automated, reliable performance with safe collision avoidance.

You will implement orbit determination, propagation, and attitude modeling algorithms, and develop the in-house back-end for ephemerides and maneuvers. You’ll work with mission engineers to translate requirements into operational outcomes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in physics or an engineering discipline.
• Deep technical understanding of orbital mechanics, state estimation, maneuver planning, conjunction assessment, and attitude modeling.
• Fundamentals of numerical methods: solvers, optimization, and simulation.
• Experience with designing and developing software libraries and backend services, in Python.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.

Responsibilities

• Implement orbit determination, orbit propagation, and attitude modeling algorithms.
• Develop in-house flight dynamics ground software backend for ephemerides and maneuvers.
• Interface with systems engineers to translate mission requirements into operations.
• Support LEOP/anomalies/conjunction response with astrodynamics expertise.

Skills

Orbital mechanics

State estimation

Maneuver planning

Conjunction assessment

Attitude modeling

Numerical methods

Python backend development

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in physics or engineering

Master’s degree in physics or engineering (nice to have)

Tools

STK

Astrogator

GMAT

OreKit

Copernicus

OpenSpaceToolkit

Job description

Loft Orbital in Toulouse, Occitanie, seeks a Flight Dynamics Software Engineer to join the Ground Platform team. You will help scale operations for 50+ satellites and ensure automated, reliable performance with safe collision avoidance.

You will implement orbit determination, propagation, and attitude modeling algorithms, and develop the in-house back-end for ephemerides and maneuvers. You’ll work with mission engineers to translate requirements into operational outcomes.