Space Mission Ground-Segment Software Engineer II

Front Door Defense; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 184,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Relocation support

Health insurance

Job summary

Varda Space Industries is hiring a Space Mission Software Engineer II to own and evolve the ground-segment software powering spacecraft operations. You’ll work on telemetry ingestion, distribution, and commanding, building operator-friendly dashboards and real-time data pipelines.

You’ll collaborate across flight software, avionics, and operations, delivering reliable, scalable ground systems with CI/CD pipelines and observability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent safety-critical software experience.
• 3+ years of experience developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
• Proficiency in Python with strong language understanding.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, low-latency messaging, and time-series stores.
• Hands-on CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Docker/Kubernetes; release management for controlled networks.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: Develop and maintain high-reliability telemetry ingestion, distribution, and commanding.
• Mission Control Interfaces: Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that optimize ops time and cognitive load.
• Simulation and Test Automation: Build tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and automated tests.
• Build the Mission Platform: Design and productionize software for mission and ground teams; standardize CI/CD pipelines and IaC.
• Deployments Across Environments: Create deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks with safe rollout strategies.

Skills

Python

Concurrency

Networking

CI/CD

Observability

Docker/Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Varda Space Industries is hiring a Space Mission Software Engineer II to own and evolve the ground-segment software powering spacecraft operations. You’ll work on telemetry ingestion, distribution, and commanding, building operator-friendly dashboards and real-time data pipelines.

You’ll collaborate across flight software, avionics, and operations, delivering reliable, scalable ground systems with CI/CD pipelines and observability.