Flight Software Engineer — Spacecraft Autonomy & RTOS

NewOrbit; Reading; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Hybrid work

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

Private health insurance

Job summary

NewOrbit Space seeks an experienced embedded software engineer to own the onboard flight software stack, turning mission requirements into deterministic, testable software for RTOS or Embedded Linux. You will take software from simulation to launch and on-orbit operations, ensuring fault tolerance and rapid OTA updates.

You will collaborate across avionics, AOCS, and mission teams to balance compute, power, thermal, storage and link budgets, delivering robust, secure software for next-generation

Qualifications

• Proven experience building production embedded or real-time systems in C/C++ and/or Rust for space systems.
• Strong grasp of real-time software concepts: scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, determinism.
• Proven ability to build reliable, testable systems with unit/integration tests and simulations.
• Hands-on experience with hardware interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, GPIO).
• Solid software fundamentals: architecture, code review, static analysis, CI/CD and observability.
• Ability to own end-to-end systems from requirements to operations.

Responsibilities

• Own the on-board flight-software stack – design, implement and test real-time software.
• Integrate subsystems end-to-end and define ICDs for spaceflight drivers/middleware.
• Build spacecraft behaviours and autonomy including mode management and FDIR.
• Deliver reliable real-time performance with careful resource budgeting.
• Build verification infrastructure: SIL/HIL, simulations and telemetry tooling.
• Ship code from review to orbit with CI/CD and launch operations support.
• Collaborate with avionics, AOCS, comms and mission teams on budgets.

Skills

Real-time embedded software

Rust/C/C++

RTOS/Embedded Linux

Space systems domain

Hardware interfaces

CI/CD & debugging

Deterministic design

Job description

NewOrbit Space seeks an experienced embedded software engineer to own the onboard flight software stack, turning mission requirements into deterministic, testable software for RTOS or Embedded Linux. You will take software from simulation to launch and on-orbit operations, ensuring fault tolerance and rapid OTA updates.

You will collaborate across avionics, AOCS, and mission teams to balance compute, power, thermal, storage and link budgets, delivering robust, secure software for next-generation