Platform Engineer II: Embedded C++ for Spacecraft

Firefly Aerospace; Cedar Park (IL); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision plans

Parental leave

Educational reimbursement

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Firefly Aerospace seeks a Platform Engineer to lead development of critical C++ platform software and firmware for our onboard stack. You will design and implement systems software, libraries, and interfaces that connect perception algorithms with cameras, compute hardware, and flight software.

You will own core components of our customer-facing SDK and work hands-on with hardware teams to deliver reliable end-to-end systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, or related field; equivalent practical experience may be considered
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience developing complex production systems
• Experience in embedded Linux environments and integrating software with hardware and sensors
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, including multithreading, memory management, debugging, and performance optimization
• Experience designing reusable libraries, APIs, platform services, or SDK components used across engineering teams
• Understanding of software architecture, automated testing, and maintainable software design
• Ability to resolve complex system-level issues and communicate across software, algorithm, hardware, and systems engineering teams
• Desired: Master’s or PhD in related field
• Experience with spacecraft/defense/mission-critical software (beneficial)
• Experience with perception sensors, CV, or visualization pipelines (beneficial)

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, integrate, and test critical features within our onboard C++ software stack
• Build and maintain core components of the Sol3 SDK and related libraries, APIs, tools, and abstractions
• Write systems software involving IPC, hardware buses, sensor interfaces (GMSL, I2C, SPI), and networking
• Develop multithreaded, low-latency software for embedded environments
• Integrate cameras, sensors, compute platforms, and networking into end-to-end systems
• Collaborate with hardware teams to test user flows and SDK integration
• Assist perception team in integrating algorithms into SDK core components
• Develop onboard applications for perception, navigation, and mission operations
• Support software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing and spacecraft operations
• Diagnose system-level issues and contribute to architectural decisions and reviews
• Mentor other engineers

Skills

Modern C++

Multithreading

Embedded Linux

SDK design

IPC and sensors

Networking

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Master's or PhD (desired)

Tools

GMSL

I2C

SPI

Linux

TCP/IP

Job description

Firefly Aerospace seeks a Platform Engineer to lead development of critical C++ platform software and firmware for our onboard stack. You will design and implement systems software, libraries, and interfaces that connect perception algorithms with cameras, compute hardware, and flight software.

You will own core components of our customer-facing SDK and work hands-on with hardware teams to deliver reliable end-to-end systems.