Senior Spaceflight Software Engineer, Ground Ops

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Relocation support

Health insurance

Job summary

Varda Space Industries is seeking a Mission Software Engineer to own and develop the ground segment services and mission platform. You will work on telemetry ingestion, real-time data handling, and operator interfaces alongside avionics and mission ops teams.

The role requires 5+ years in safety-critical software, strong Python expertise, and hands-on CI/CD with IaC. On-site in El Segundo, CA, with stock options and relocation support.

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.
• 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, distribution, and commanding.
• Mission Control Interfaces: Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that reduce cognitive load across integration and orbit operations.
• Simulation and Test Automation: Build tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests.
• Build the Mission Platform: Design, implement, and productionize software for mission and ground software teams; standardize CI/CD pipelines and IaC.
• Deployments Across Environments: Create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks; safe rollout/rollback strategies.

Skills

Python development

Real-time systems

CI/CD

Docker/Kubernetes

Observability

Distributed systems

Networking

Infrastructure as code

Concurrency

Release management

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent safety-critical software experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Git

Job description

Varda Space Industries is seeking a Mission Software Engineer to own and develop the ground segment services and mission platform. You will work on telemetry ingestion, real-time data handling, and operator interfaces alongside avionics and mission ops teams.

The role requires 5+ years in safety-critical software, strong Python expertise, and hands-on CI/CD with IaC. On-site in El Segundo, CA, with stock options and relocation support.