Senior Ground Segment Software Engineer - Spacecraft Ops

Frontdoor Defense; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 169,000 - 216,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Long-term cash awards

Job summary

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own and evolve the ground segment software stack for spacecraft operations. You will work hands-on with telemetry ingestion, distribution, and real-time control across lab, test, and mission environments.

You will build mission-grade UIs, enable CI/CD pipelines, and deploy software in secure networks, collaborating with avionics and operations teams.

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.
• Have 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.
• 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

Concurrency

Networking

Performance

Observability

CI/CD

Real-time data

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Math/Physics/Engineering or equivalent safety-critical software experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Ansible

NiceGUI

Job description

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA, seeks a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own and evolve the ground segment software stack for spacecraft operations. You will work hands-on with telemetry ingestion, distribution, and real-time control across lab, test, and mission environments.

You will build mission-grade UIs, enable CI/CD pipelines, and deploy software in secure networks, collaborating with avionics and operations teams.