Lead Space Systems Software Engineer

Firefly Aerospace; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision plans

Parental leave

Educational reimbursement

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Firefly Aerospace is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the development of critical features across the perception, camera, compute, and mission operations stack. You will build libraries and interfaces connecting perception algorithms with cameras, hardware, simulation, flight software, and mission operations, working across systems to enable reliable space missions.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in software engineering, embedded systems, and spacecraft operations, with a

Qualifications

• Required: Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, or related field; equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience developing complex production systems.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++ (multithreading, memory management, debugging, performance).
• Experience designing reusable libraries/APIs/platform services used across teams.
• Experience Linux environments and hardware/software integration.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, integration, and testing of features within our software stack.
• Build reusable C and Python libraries, APIs, tools connecting perception with cameras and compute hardware.
• Define interfaces across a large production codebase.
• Develop and optimize multithreaded, low-latency software for constrained environments.
• Integrate cameras, sensors, compute platforms, and networking into end-to-end systems.

Skills

C++

Python

Linux

Multithreading

Debugging

Performance optimization

System architecture

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE

Masters/PhD preferred

Tools

Linux

Job description

Firefly Aerospace is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the development of critical features across the perception, camera, compute, and mission operations stack. You will build libraries and interfaces connecting perception algorithms with cameras, hardware, simulation, flight software, and mission operations, working across systems to enable reliable space missions.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in software engineering, embedded systems, and spacecraft operations, with a