Senior Mission Software Engineer (Spacecraft)

Location: On-site in El Segundo, California, United States

Salary: $169,067–$216,031 per year, plus eligibility for stock options and/or long-term cash awards.

Company

Varda develops commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing, reentry capsules, heat shields, and satellite buses, with vehicles and production operations based in-house.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain high-reliability ground segment services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding.
• Build operator-grade mission control UIs and dashboards for integration, testing, and on-orbit operations.
• Create flight-software simulations, device emulators, scenario-based automated tests, and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks.
• Design and productionize self-service mission platform tooling, including CI/CD, artifact management, infrastructure-as-code, service templates, test harnesses, and observability.
• Implement robust deployments across lab benches, test stands, and mission networks, including safe rollouts, rollbacks, and air-gapped or limited-connectivity environments.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, mathematics, physics, engineering, or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software.
• 5+ years of experience developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
• Expertise in Python and strong understanding of its language concepts.
• Strong systems fundamentals in concurrency, networking, performance, and reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services using low-latency messaging and time-series and relational data stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency and build systems, infrastructure-as-code, logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States and qualify as a U.S. person for access to export-controlled technology.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in C++, Ansible, and/or NiceGUI.
• Experience with data acquisition and closed-loop control in lab or test-control environments.
• Experience integrating CI, testing, simulation, or data tools with flight-software teams.
• Experience with requirements, testing, and certification artifacts in safety-critical or certified workflows.
• Knowledge of ground-systems standards and security in mission networks.
• Experience building mission-grade UIs with structured command workflows, alarming, and situational awareness.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with spacecraft, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission operations teams.
• Vehicles, equipment, and materials are built, integrated, and tested in company production facilities.
• Full-time on-site work in El Segundo.
• Eligible incentives include stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
• Employment is subject to U.S. employment authorization and export-control requirements.