Senior Ground Software Engineer

Astro Mechanica; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vis

401(k) program and stock option plan

Flexible time-off: PTO/holidays/sick

Flexible work environment

Job summary

Astro Mechanica is seeking a Senior Ground Software Engineer (Telemetry & Control) to own the data from air to Mission Control. You will architect and implement the end-to-end ground data pipeline, ensuring low-latency telemetry processing, storage, and real-time visualization.

You will design for fault tolerance, select appropriate databases, and build operator tools to monitor aircraft health. This role emphasizes backend and cloud work, with frontend data visualization as a plus.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or a Science discipline and 5+ years of professional software development experience.
• Experience building real-time data or telemetry ingestion and processing systems.
• Experience implementing a cloud stack that ingests data, stores it in a database, and processes it to serve an application.
• Hands-on experience with time series databases and understanding trade-offs between database technologies and data ingestion approaches.
• Experience designing low-latency, high-reliability systems, including fault tolerance for network and service failures.
• Proficiency in the languages, frameworks, and API design used to expose data from a database to applications.
• Breadth across the stack with depth in backend and cloud; frontend experience is a plus.
• Telemetry from physical systems and observability tooling is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the end-to-end ground data pipeline, from telemetry ingestion off the radio link through real-time processing, storage, backend APIs and business logic, to front-end visualization in Mission Control.
• Drive low latency across the entire system, targeting roughly one second from aircraft to operator display.
• Design for fault tolerance so that a failed network path, a crashed service, or a cloud region outage never puts the aircraft at risk.
• Select and operate the right database technologies, including time series databases, for flight telemetry.
• Build tools operators use to monitor aircraft health and command the plane.
• Keep the pipeline clean and simple so the team can reason about it end to end.
• Work with flight software to define interfaces between aircraft and ground.

Skills

Real-time telemetry

Data ingestion

Time-series DBs

Cloud architecture

Backend development

API design

Frontend live data

Telemetry experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Math/Science

Job description

ABOUT US:

Astro Mechanica is a vertically integrated aerospace company developing a scalable technology platform to power critical infrastructure, mission operations, and the future of flight. We apply aerospace engineering and quality standards across our products, delivering high performance, reliability, and efficiency for the most demanding operating environments. Astro Mechanica is backed by leading venture and strategic investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Giant Step Capital, United Airlines Ventures, and Voyager Ventures.

WHO WE ARE:

We're a team of passionate engineers dedicated to advancing aerospace. We're generalists with specialist depth, united by a flat structure and a shared obsession with building things that work well. We move fast, stay pragmatic, and let engineering excellence speak louder than hierarchy.

WHO YOU ARE:

Astro Mechanica is seeking a Senior Ground Software Engineer (Telemetry & Control) to join our growing team. The ideal candidate is excited to own all of our aircraft's data from the moment it leaves the plane until a command goes back to it: everything from the aircraft radio down. You will architect the end-to-end system that ingests, processes, stores, and visualizes flight telemetry in Mission Control, observes the health of the aircraft, and commands the plane. This is not a big-data problem; the data is modest in volume but complex and time critical, and it should reach an operator's screen within one second of leaving the aircraft. Your work at Astro Mechanica will be fast-paced in a dynamic startup environment and will have a direct impact on our mission.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Architect and build the end-to-end ground data pipeline, from telemetry ingestion off the radio link through real-time processing, storage, backend APIs and business logic, to front-end visualization in Mission Control

• Drive low latency across the entire system, not just one stage, targeting roughly one second from aircraft to operator display

• Design for fault tolerance so that a failed network path, a crashed service, or a cloud region outage never puts the aircraft at risk

• Select and operate the right database technologies, including time series databases, for flight telemetry

• Build the tools operators use to monitor aircraft health and command the plane

• Keep the pipeline clean and simple enough that the team can reason about it end to end

• Work closely with flight software and other engineering disciplines to define the interfaces between the aircraft and the ground

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or a Science discipline and 5+ years of professional software development experience

• Experience building real-time data or telemetry ingestion and processing systems

• Experience implementing a cloud stack that ingests data, stores it in a database, and processes it to serve an application (web, mobile, or otherwise)

• Hands-on experience with time series databases and a strong understanding of the trade-offs between database technologies and data ingestion approaches

• Experience designing low-latency, high-reliability systems, including fault tolerance for network and service failures

• Proficiency in the languages, frameworks, and API design used to expose data from a database to applications

• Breadth across the stack, with the greatest depth on the backend and cloud side; you don't need to have built every layer

• Front-end experience building web apps that query a server and render live data is a plus

• Experience with telemetry from physical systems (aircraft, launch vehicles, satellites, autonomous vehicles, or connected vehicle fleets), radio links, or mission control and observability tooling is a plus

PERKS & BENEFITS:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, including Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

• 401(k) program and transparent stock option plan

• Self-managed and flexible time-off policy, including PTO, paid holidays, and sick time

• Flexible work environment

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

At Astro Mechanica, we highly value in-office work to foster collaboration and strengthen our company culture. We consider working in the office five days a week an essential part of the employee's role.

Astro Mechanica is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly recruit and hire a diverse workforce and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.