Staff Software Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Denver, Colorado, United States

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 per year

Company

Venture-backed aerospace startup designing, building, operating, and selling stratospheric balloon systems and earth-observation data products for commercial and government customers.

What you will do

• Design, build, deploy, and operate a full-stack MRP system supporting balloon manufacturing.
• Develop workflows for inventory, work orders, bills of materials, quality holds, serialized parts, and end-to-end traceability.
• Build operator-focused interfaces for tablets, barcode scanning, multi-step assembly procedures, and drag-and-drop work instructions.
• Work directly with manufacturing technicians, logistics coordinators, quality inspectors, finance, and other stakeholders to translate physical processes into software.
• Own systems across backend, frontend, and infrastructure from concept through production, support, and ongoing iteration.
• Participate in deployments, debugging, observability, architectural decisions, and technical improvements.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in system design, data structures, architecture, data modeling, schema design, and SQL.
• Experience building and operating backend systems at scale and owning production systems in rapidly changing environments.
• Comfort with cloud infrastructure and modern DevOps practices.
• Strong communication skills, adaptability, and the ability to collaborate directly with non-engineering stakeholders.
• Ability to use AI tools daily while reviewing, restructuring, and taking accountability for the correctness and maintainability of generated code.

Nice to have

• Experience with TypeScript, modern web development, React, clean APIs, and well-structured monoliths.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, raw SQL, migrations, ClickHouse, Playwright, AWS, Terraform, Docker, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Manufacturing or MRP experience.
• Interest in mentoring engineers and raising technical quality.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, supportive team culture grounded in candor, inclusion, respect, and empowerment.
• High ownership, direct collaboration, and frequent iteration in a fast-moving environment.
• Stock options.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Unlimited vacation days and a cell phone bill stipend.