Senior Mission Software Engineer: Ground Ops for Spacecraft

Varda Space Industries; Hawthorne (CA); On-site; USD 169,000 - 216,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

Relocation support

Stock options

401(k) with company match

Cell phone reimbursement

One Medical memberships

Job summary

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA is seeking a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to command.

You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, building scalable, reliable services and self-service tooling for CI/CD and deployment across lab and mission networks.

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 and strong understanding of language concepts.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services with low-latency messaging and time-series 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, IaC, simulation and HIL frameworks, test harnesses, observability.
• 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

Reliability

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Multithreading

Education

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

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

NiceGUI

Ansible

Job description

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA is seeking a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to command.

You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, building scalable, reliable services and self-service tooling for CI/CD and deployment across lab and mission networks.