Mission Ground Systems Engineer II (Equity Eligible)

Vardaspace; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 184,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Relocation support

401(k) with match

Wellness reimbursement

Job summary

Varda Space Industries, based in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Mission Software Engineer II to own the ground segment software and its deployment across varied environments. You will work on telemetry ingestion, commanding, and mission control interfaces with a focus on reliability and real-time performance.

You will develop tools for flight software simulation, device emulation, and automated testing while enabling scalable CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent technical experience in safety critical software.
• 3+ years of experience in the development of spacecraft or similar safety critical software.
• Expertise with development in Python, along with a strong understanding of the language concepts.
• Have strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. Ensure deterministic behavior for real-time operations and post-flight analysis.
• Mission Control Interfaces: Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that optimize 'ops time' and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit operations phases.
• Simulation and Test Automation: Build tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests—enabling fast, safe iteration for avionics, GNC, and operations teams.
• Build the Mission Platform: Design, implement, and productionize software for mission and ground software teams. Standardize CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, and observability - all delivered as self-service tooling.
• Deployments Across Environments: Create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks. Implement safe rollout/rollback strategies and air-gapped or limited-connectivity deployment approaches.

Skills

Python

CI/CD

Docker/Kubernetes

Real-time systems

Telemetry/commanding

Observability

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/related

Tools

Ansible

NiceGUI

Job description

Varda Space Industries, based in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Mission Software Engineer II to own the ground segment software and its deployment across varied environments. You will work on telemetry ingestion, commanding, and mission control interfaces with a focus on reliability and real-time performance.

You will develop tools for flight software simulation, device emulation, and automated testing while enabling scalable CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.