Senior Mission Software Engineer: Ground Systems & Ops

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

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Company-paid Medical, Dental and Visio

Parental leave (12 weeks)

Relocation support

Stock options

Job summary

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to commanding across lab, test, and mission environments.

You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, delivering scalable services, operator interfaces, and automated testing in a safety-critical setting.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a technical field and safety-critical software experience.
• 5+ years developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
• Proficiency in Python and solid understanding of Python concepts.
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency, networking, performance and reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services with low-latency messaging.
• Hands-on CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Experience with Docker/Kubernetes and release management for controlled networks.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: develop and maintain high-reliability telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
• Mission Control Interfaces: deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards for ops teams.
• Simulation and Test Automation: build tools for flight-software simulations and scenario-based tests.
• Build the Mission Platform: design and productionize software with CI/CD pipelines and IaC templates.
• Deployments Across Environments: robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks.

Skills

Python

Concurrency

Networking

Performance

Observability

CI/CD

Real-time data

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 in El Segundo, CA seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to commanding across lab, test, and mission environments.

You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops, delivering scalable services, operator interfaces, and automated testing in a safety-critical setting.