Senior Spacecraft Ground-Segment Engineer — Real-Time Ops & CI/CD

Frontdoor Defense; 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 Space Industries in El Segundo, CA is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground-segment software and the production platform enabling telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, and mission control interfaces.

You will build real-time, scalable services, improve CI/CD pipelines, and deploy across lab, test, and mission environments, collaborating with avionics and operations teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a relevant technical field.
• 5+ years in safety-critical software for spacecraft or similar.
• Proficiency in Python and strong language fundamentals.
• Solid systems knowledge: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling and distribution services.
• 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 and distribution services.
• Develop Mission Control Interfaces: deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards.
• Build Simulation and Test Automation tools for flight software integration.
• Develop the Mission Platform: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and observability tooling.
• Design deployments across lab, test stands, and mission networks with safe rollout strategies.

Skills

Python

Real-time systems

Concurrency

Networking

Performance & reliability

CI/CD

Observability

Infrastructure as code

Education

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

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, CA is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground-segment software and the production platform enabling telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, and mission control interfaces.

You will build real-time, scalable services, improve CI/CD pipelines, and deploy across lab, test, and mission environments, collaborating with avionics and operations teams.