Senior Spacecraft Ground & Mission Control Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Long-term cash awards

Job summary

Varda is hiring a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform enabling spacecraft operations in El Segundo, CA. You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops to ensure reliable telemetry ingestion and real-time data handling.

You will build operator-grade dashboards, simulations, and automated tests, and productionize the mission platform with CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a technical field with safety-critical software experience.
• 5+ years of experience in developing spacecraft or safety-critical software.
• Expertise with Python and solid 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/relational stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Docker/Kubernetes; release management and phased rollouts for controlled networks.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: develop and maintain high-reliability 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 to optimize ops time and reduce cognitive load across phases.
• Simulation and Test Automation: build tools for flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests.
• Build the Mission Platform: design and productionize software for mission and ground teams; standardize CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code.
• Deployments Across Environments: create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks with safe rollout/rollback strategies.

Skills

Python

CI/CD

Docker/Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, or engineering

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

NiceGUI

Job description

Varda is hiring a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software and the platform enabling spacecraft operations in El Segundo, CA. You will work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission ops to ensure reliable telemetry ingestion and real-time data handling.

You will build operator-grade dashboards, simulations, and automated tests, and productionize the mission platform with CI/CD pipelines.