Senior Space Mission Software Engineer: Real-Time Ground Ops

Varda Space Industries; Los Angeles (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 is seeking a Senior Space Mission Software Engineer to own and advance our ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to distribution and mission control interfaces. You will work with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops.

You will build reusable, scalable ground software components, design CI/CD workflows, and deploy across lab, test range, and mission networks, while

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. 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, 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

Real-time systems

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Observability

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 is seeking a Senior Space Mission Software Engineer to own and advance our ground segment software and the platform it runs on, enabling spacecraft operations from telemetry to distribution and mission control interfaces. You will work with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops.

You will build reusable, scalable ground software components, design CI/CD workflows, and deploy across lab, test range, and mission networks, while