Senior Mission Software Engineer — Ground Ops & Simulation

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity incentives

401(k) with 6% employer match

Relocation assistance

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Varda Space Industries, based in El Segundo, CA, seeks a mission software engineer to lead ground-segment software and mission-control tooling. You will work on telemetry ingestion, data distribution, and real-time operations across flight software, avionics, and ground systems.

The role emphasizes building reusable CI/CD pipelines, scalable services, and observability, with on-site duties at Varda's California facility.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a technical field with safety-critical software experience.
• 5+ years in spacecraft or safety-critical software development.
• Strong Python programming skills and understanding of language concepts.
• Solid systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience with real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services, including low-latency messaging and time-series stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability through logging, metrics, tracing.
• Experience with Docker/Kubernetes; release management and controlled-network deployments.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: develop and maintain high-reliability telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
• Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards to optimize ops time and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit operations.
• Build tools for flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests for avionics and operations teams.
• Design, implement, and productionize software for mission and ground software teams; standardize CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code.
• Create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks with safe rollout/rollback strategies.

Skills

Python

Concurrency

Networking

Real-time data

CI/CD

Observability

End-to-end testing

Safety-critical software

Education

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

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Varda Space Industries, based in El Segundo, CA, seeks a mission software engineer to lead ground-segment software and mission-control tooling. You will work on telemetry ingestion, data distribution, and real-time operations across flight software, avionics, and ground systems.

The role emphasizes building reusable CI/CD pipelines, scalable services, and observability, with on-site duties at Varda's California facility.