Staff Software Engineer Clearance, Flight Software

Role overview A staff-level flight software engineering role designing, developing, integrating, and testing the software and firmware that runs on orbiting satellites as part of a low-Earth-orbit constellation platform. The position spans the full lifecycle from concept and requirements through design, bring-up, and on-orbit operations, with significant technical leadership across the satellite bus and payload stack.

Responsibilities - Translate mission concepts and requirements into robust design and working implementations, supporting systems through on-orbit operations - Design, bring up, and support the embedded software environment running on ARM Cortex-M flight processors and peripherals - Provide technical leadership on key projects, organizing cross-functional teams to deliver mission-critical capabilities - Develop application, platform, and driver functionality in the flight software environment and mentor others on its use - Integrate compute and peripheral subsystems across software and hardware boundaries - Develop technical strategy documents covering architectural patterns, shared libraries, and common services - Collaborate with hardware teams on board bring-up and with software teams on flight architecture, infrastructure, tooling, and cloud backend interfaces - Contribute to software- and hardware-in-the-loop test strategies

Requirements - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, electrical engineering, or a closely related field - 7+ years of professional software engineering experience in a team environment - Strong C/C++ programming with practical familiarity in additional languages - Deep embedded systems fundamentals: resource-efficient design, low-level drivers, bit manipulation, IRQ handling, RTOS frameworks, and I/O and communication buses - Experience integrating and controlling external hardware devices and reading hardware data sheets - Excellent communication and presentation skills - Previous work on government or defense projects - Current active TS security clearance

Nice to have - Prior experience in flight software or a closely related domain - Familiarity with industry-standard data formats and schemas such as ProtoBuf, YAML, and JSON - Rust and Python experience - Comfort in a Linux-based development environment - Experience with embedded Linux, FPGA, hardware design, RF communication systems, or network architecture - End-to-end product development from concept through customer delivery

Benefits and work setup - Salary range of $228,000 to $252,000 plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits - Medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k), short- and long-term disability, and life insurance - Three weeks of paid vacation for new employees, 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time, and paid parental leave - Role may be remote or based at headquarters in San Jose, California; hiring restricted to specified U.S. states - Position requires access to export-controlled information and U.S. person status or appropriate export authorization