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Loft Orbital is building the first marketplace for space-based AI applications, enabling partners to publish, deploy, and monetize AI solutions running on satellites in orbit. The company integrates, launches, and operates spacecraft for governments, companies, and research institutions, with a growing fleet on track to reach 30 satellites by 2027.
As Director of Embedded Software & FPGA Engineering, you will own the ESW and FPGA roadmap and technical direction across Loft's satellite platforms. You will define hardware-abstraction architecture and interfaces spanning FPGA, embedded software, onboard software, and operational layers, driving hardware-agnostic and reusable platform capabilities that improve team independence and allow hardware and technology to evolve.
Key responsibilities include:
- Establishing technical direction and enabling ESW and FPGA leads through clear direction, decision context, coaching, and removal of organizational or technical blockers
- Setting expectations for architecture, design reviews, code quality, testing, verification, documentation, and operational readiness
- Building core engineering foundations for Linux, Yocto/OpenEmbedded, CI/CD, reproducible builds, and secure or sovereign environments
- Guiding technology choices involving hypervisors, RISC-V, Rust, and other platform technologies
- Acting as the technical face of ESW and FPGA, triaging company-wide technical issues, dependencies, and trade-offs
- Managing and developing geographically distributed teams, including hiring, mentorship, performance management, and team health
- Representing the organization with customers, partners, and government or defense stakeholders on formal assurance and documentation matters
You will work in a fast-growing aerospace company with offices in San Francisco, Golden, and Toulouse, scaling rapidly to meet accelerating demand for space infrastructure.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must Haves:
- 10+ years of experience in embedded systems, FPGA, firmware, or closely related engineering, including delivery of mission-critical hardware or software
- Proven experience leading and managing technical teams, including geographically distributed teams
- Deep experience with FPGA design, embedded C/C++, real-time systems, and HW/SW integration
- Experience designing HW abstractions and hardware-agnostic interfaces from both technical and architectural perspectives
- Strong Linux kernel and embedded Linux experience, including low-level integration, drivers, boot, or system debugging
- Strong Yocto/OpenEmbedded and CI/CD experience, including build infrastructure, automated testing, and reproducible releases
- Experience building secure and sovereign environments, including trust boundaries, secure boot, signing, controlled dependencies, or related security architecture
- Experience with hypervisors, RISC-V, ARM, and Rust development environments
- Track record of making sound trade-offs across reliability, performance, security, schedule, and technology evolution
- Collaborative, solution-minded leadership with the ability to enable leads, manage people with empathy and accountability, and act as a trusted cross-company technical representative
Nice to Haves:
- Experience with spacecraft avionics, command and data handling (C&DH), payload interfaces, or satellite flight systems
- Experience in New Space or satellite manufacturing, particularly standardized, modular, or repeatable satellite platforms
- Experience with radiation-tolerant or radiation-hardened design and understanding of the space environment
- Experience with real-time operating systems such as RTEMS, FreeRTOS, or VxWorks
- Experience with high-speed interfaces such as Ethernet, SpaceWire, SpaceFibre, CAN, PCIe, USB, or MIL-STD-1553
- Experience with ARM-based embedded systems, U-Boot, ARM Trusted Firmware, device-tree overlays, or secure boot implementation
- Experience contributing to upstream Linux or maintaining kernel modules, platform drivers, or low-level middleware
- Experience with hypervisor isolation, virtualized I/O, partitioning, or mixed-criticality system design
- Experience using RISC-V or Rust in production, platform, tooling, or security-sensitive environments
- Exposure to onboard AI/ML compute or edge-processing hardware
- Experience supporting government or defense programs with formal assurance, security, sovereignty, and documentation requirements
