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Venus Aerospace is revolutionizing rocket engine propulsion with proprietary Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine technology. The company is seeking an Embedded Software Engineer to develop flight software for next-generation avionics and flight computer systems.
You will join a small, multidisciplinary software team and have significant ownership in shaping the architecture, processes, and technical direction of the embedded systems area. As an early member of the growing Embedded Software team, you'll have the opportunity to take on technical and people leadership as the organization expands.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, implement, and integrate real-time embedded software for flight computers and avionics systems
- Translate system and hardware requirements into robust, maintainable, and testable software
- Work across the hardware/software boundary to bring up, debug, and integrate embedded systems
- Develop software with the rigor required for mission-critical aerospace systems, including fault handling, verification, and configuration management
- Develop automated unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing to verify flight software
- Collaborate with Avionics, GNC, Test, Ground Software, and QA engineers to solve complex system-level problems
- Help establish embedded software architecture, development processes, tools, and engineering practices
- Take ownership of projects from concept through implementation, integration, and flight readiness
- Mentor engineers and help lead the Embedded Software organization as the team grows
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience developing embedded systems for flight-related systems
- Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related engineering discipline (advanced degree a plus; equivalent professional experience may be considered)
- Strong proficiency in C and/or C++ for resource-constrained embedded systems
- Experience developing software for microcontrollers, SoCs, or embedded CPUs
- Strong understanding of embedded concepts: interrupts and interrupt handling, DMA peripherals, memory-mapped I/O, timers and watchdogs, serial communication interfaces, concurrency and synchronization, memory management and resource constraints
- Ability to read schematics, datasheets, reference manuals, and hardware specifications and translate them into software requirements
- Experience developing real-time embedded software with deterministic timing requirements
- Familiarity with RTOS concepts: scheduling, priorities, synchronization, inter-task communication, and timing analysis
- Understanding of latency, jitter, deadline misses, and failure modes in real-time systems
- Experience reasoning about system behavior when multiple asynchronous events occur simultaneously
- Experience developing safety/reliability-critical aerospace software where correctness and fault handling are critical
- Experience with fault detection and handling, redundancy or graceful degradation, watchdogs and health monitoring, startup/self-test behavior, robust state-machine design, and safe handling of unexpected inputs and hardware faults
- Understanding of nominal vs. degraded/failed hardware/software conditions
- Experience with Weapons Open Systems Architecture (WOSA) and Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA)
- Experience writing unit and integration tests
- Ability to create test cases from software requirements
- Familiarity with code coverage and other objective measures of verification
- Ability to diagnose problems spanning the SW/HW boundary
- Comfort with GIT and modern code-review workflows, CI/CD for embedded systems, static analysis and compiler diagnostics, automated regression testing, requirements tracking and traceability, issue tracking and defect analysis, peer reviews of code and design, and writing clear technical documentation
- Ability to collaborate closely with Avionics, GNC, Propulsion, Test, and Ground Software engineers
- Systems-level thinking and ability to translate system-level requirements into software architecture
- Understanding of interfaces between flight software and sensors, actuators, communications systems, and other onboard computers
Desirable Experience:
- Experience developing or integrating embedded software within modular weapons, missiles, avionics, or other mission-critical architecture
- Familiarity with defensive programming and failure containment
- Experience interfacing/developing code for FPGAs
- MIL-STD-1553, RS-422, and RS-485 experience
- Compliance experience with DO-178C or MIL-STD-882E standards
- Thrust Vector Control (TVC) experience
- Experience working with Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and Global Positioning System (GPS) chips
- SpaceWire / Time-Triggered Ethernet experience
- Experience with Model-in-the-Loop (MIL), Software-in-the-Loop (SIL), and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing environments
- Experience debugging software using JTAG/SWD or equivalent debugging interfaces, Logic Analyzers, Oscilloscopes, Serial/Network interfaces, and Embedded tracing/logging tools
- DAQ fundamentals for voltage, current, and temperature measurements
- Experience developing automated test infrastructure
- Experience with GitLab pipelines, Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence), or systems engineering practices
- Experience working in development environments where changes need to be reviewable, reproducible, and traceable
Note: This position requires ITAR compliance. Applicants must be U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, protected individuals as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
