Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer - Ground & Ops

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

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Medical/Dental/Vision coverage for you

Relocation support

Stock options/long-term incentives

401(k) with employer match

Wellness reimbursement

Parental leave

One Medical memberships

EV charging

Team events

Job summary

Varda Space Industries is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment and mission-control software platform. You will work across telemetry, data distribution, and test automation, collaborating with flight software and avionics teams.

You will design and productionize software, standardize CI/CD pipelines, and enable reliable deployments from lab benches to mission networks, with on-site responsibilities in El Segundo, CA.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent technical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in the development of spacecraft or similar safety critical software.
• Expertise with development in Python and strong language understanding.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services.
• 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 highly reliable telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
• Mission Control Interfaces: deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards to optimize ops time.
• Simulation and Test Automation: build tools for flight-software simulations and device emulators.
• Build the Mission Platform: standardize CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, and IaC tooling.
• Deployments Across Environments: create robust deployment patterns with safe rollout strategies.

Skills

Python

Concurrency

Networking

Real-time data acquisition

CI/CD

Docker/Kubernetes

Education

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

Tools

Ansible

NiceGUI

C++

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Varda Space Industries is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment and mission-control software platform. You will work across telemetry, data distribution, and test automation, collaborating with flight software and avionics teams.

You will design and productionize software, standardize CI/CD pipelines, and enable reliable deployments from lab benches to mission networks, with on-site responsibilities in El Segundo, CA.