Senior Ground-Segment Software Engineer (Space Ops)

Varda Space Industries, Inc.; El Segundo, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 169,000 - 216,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Long-term cash awards

Job summary

Varda Space Industries, Inc. in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own ground segment software and the platform it runs on for spacecraft operations.

You will work with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, building reliable telemetry ingestion and command services. The role emphasizes CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability, with deployment across lab, test ranges, and on-orbit environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent technical experience in safety critical software.
• 5+ 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.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services - low-latency messaging, time-series and relational stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability experience: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Docker/Kubernetes; release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.

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

Real-time data acquisition

CI/CD principles

Observability

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent technical experience in safety critical software

Tools

Docker/Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Infrastructure as code

NiceGUI

Ansible

Job description

Varda Space Industries, Inc. in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own ground segment software and the platform it runs on for spacecraft operations.

You will work with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, building reliable telemetry ingestion and command services. The role emphasizes CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability, with deployment across lab, test ranges, and on-orbit environments.