Onboard Software Engineer — Linux & Containers

Loft Orbital; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible Time Off

401(k) with equity

Daily catered lunches

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Loft Orbital is seeking a capable engineer for its Onboard Software group in San Francisco to own and evolve the software that runs in orbit. You will work across Linux internals, container runtimes, and CI pipelines, shipping software that powers satellite workloads and customer applications in low Earth orbit.

You will help design and deploy the bundle management tool, harden onboard Linux infrastructure, and extend the Runtime Container Environment to securely run workloads.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, or similar runtimes).
• Deep Linux system knowledge: boot process, service management, filesystem layout, and failure recovery.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab-CI, Jenkins, or similar).
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Experience with embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Working Python.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to and evolve our bundle management tool—resolving package dependencies and assembling mission-specific software stacks.
• Develop and harden our onboard Linux infrastructure: deployment, execution, and reliability in orbit.
• Evolve our Runtime Container Environment: container manager, base images, and registry services for secure workloads.
• Support scaling of the deployment pipeline as new hardware platforms are added.
• Contribute to Product Validation as part of the development pipeline.
• Design, implement, and refine software with ownership from concept through delivery.
• Participate in code reviews and drive continuous improvement of development processes.

Skills

Containerization

Linux internals

CI/CD pipelines

Git

Embedded systems

Python

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Job description

Loft Orbital is seeking a capable engineer for its Onboard Software group in San Francisco to own and evolve the software that runs in orbit. You will work across Linux internals, container runtimes, and CI pipelines, shipping software that powers satellite workloads and customer applications in low Earth orbit.

You will help design and deploy the bundle management tool, harden onboard Linux infrastructure, and extend the Runtime Container Environment to securely run workloads.