Principal Software Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Onsite in Austin, Texas, or Littleton, Colorado; fully remote candidates may be considered with travel to Austin for approximately one week every other month, up to six weeks annually, plus occasional additional travel. Must meet U.S. ITAR eligibility requirements: U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or eligible to obtain the required U.S. authorizations.

Company

hirify.global develops space and defense technology for launching, landing, and operating space systems from Earth to the Moon and beyond.

What you will do

• Lead the design, development, integration, and testing of critical features across the software stack.
• Build reusable C++ and Python libraries, APIs, tools, and abstractions connecting perception algorithms with cameras, compute hardware, simulation, flight software, and mission operations.
• Design maintainable interfaces and optimize multithreaded, low-latency software for compute-, memory-, and bandwidth-constrained environments.
• Integrate cameras, sensors, networking interfaces, and heterogeneous compute platforms into reliable end-to-end systems.
• Develop software involving 3D geometry, coordinate transformations, camera models, spatial data, visualization, simulation, and reconstruction.
• Support software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, spacecraft integration, mission simulation, flight operations, architecture reviews, system debugging, and mentoring.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, aerospace engineering, robotics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience developing complex production systems.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, including multithreading, memory management, debugging, and performance optimization.
• Experience designing reusable libraries, APIs, platform services, or software abstractions used across engineering teams.
• Experience with Linux development and integration with hardware, sensors, networking interfaces, or external systems.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, algorithms, automated testing, maintainable software design, and cross-functional system-level problem solving.

Nice to have

• Master’s or PhD in computer science, robotics, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with spacecraft, aerospace, robotics, autonomous vehicles, defense systems, or other mission-critical applications.
• Python experience for tooling, automation, testing, simulation, or data analysis.
• Experience with computer vision, visual navigation, state estimation, localization, mapping, perception pipelines, or flight software interfaces.
• Experience integrating perception sensors with embedded Linux, GPUs, FPGAs, or other heterogeneous compute platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision plans with low deductibles.
• Parental leave and short-term disability coverage.
• Educational reimbursement.
• Flexible PTO options.
• Work supporting spacecraft integration, mission simulation, and flight operations.