Lead Flight Software Engineer - Remote | Equity + OTA

NewOrbit; England; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation

Private health insurance with dental/2

Hybrid working – 1 remote day/week

Visa sponsorship & relocation

Job summary

NewOrbit builds satellites, delivering cutting-edge VLEO missions with autonomous flight software controlling real-time operations. The role leads the flight software team and owns the onboard stack, from design to launch and on-orbit operations, ensuring safety, fault tolerance, and rapid OTA updates.

You will work across avionics, AOCS, and comms to optimize compute, power, thermal, and storage budgets while delivering robust, testable software in RTOS or Embedded Linux environments.

Qualifications

• 5+ years’ experience in development of flight software for spacecraft, including leading engineers with flight software deliverables.
• Proven experience in building production embedded or real‑time systems in C/C++ and/or Rust on RTOS or Embedded Linux for space systems.
• Strong grasp of real-time software: scheduling, interrupts, concurrency primitives, determinism, and designing for constrained CPU/memory.
• Proven ability to build reliable, testable systems: unit/integration testing, simulation-first development, HIL validation, and disciplined debugging.
• Hands‑on experience integrating with hardware via common interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN(-FD), GPIO, etc.) and practical lab debugging.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals: architecture, code review, static analysis, CI/CD, configuration management, and observability/logging.
• Ability to own systems end‑to‑end: from requirements and design through implementation, verification, operations support, and iterative improvement.

Responsibilities

• Lead the flight software engineering team – recruit, coach, and direct the work of a team of software engineers to deliver the flight software elements of a novel spacecraft to operate in VLEO.
• Own the on-board flight-software stack – design, implement and test real-time C/C++ on RTOS or Embedded Linux.
• Integrate subsystems end-to‑end – define ICDs and build drivers/middleware over I2C/SPI/UART/CAN(-FD)/SpaceWire.
• Build spacecraft behaviors & autonomy – implement mode management, sequencing, and autonomous FDIR for safe and productive operations.
• Deliver reliable real-time performance – manage concurrency, timing, CPU/memory budgets, and observability under tight constraints.
• Build verification infrastructure – prototypes, SIL/HIL test harnesses, simulations, and telemetry analysis tooling to validate designs early.
• Ship code from review to orbit – push through CI/CD, support integration and launch ops, and deliver secure over-the-air updates.
• Work across disciplines – collaborate with avionics, AOCS, comms and mission teams to trade compute, power, thermal, storage and link budgets.

Skills

Flight software

C/C++

Rust

RTOS/Embedded Linux

Tools

I2C/SPI/UART/CAN(-FD)/SpaceWire

Job description

NewOrbit builds satellites, delivering cutting-edge VLEO missions with autonomous flight software controlling real-time operations. The role leads the flight software team and owns the onboard stack, from design to launch and on-orbit operations, ensuring safety, fault tolerance, and rapid OTA updates.

You will work across avionics, AOCS, and comms to optimize compute, power, thermal, and storage budgets while delivering robust, testable software in RTOS or Embedded Linux environments.