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Impulse is seeking an Embedded Software Engineer to design, implement, validate, and maintain onboard image processing software for spacecraft systems. You will work at the intersection of embedded software, imaging sensors, numerical algorithms, and guidance/navigation/control (GNC) systems, collaborating with avionics, flight software, test, and mission operations teams to deliver reliable image processing software for microcontroller-class hardware in demanding space environments.
Key responsibilities include developing onboard computer vision algorithms for image preprocessing, thresholding, filtering, centroiding, feature extraction, target detection and tracking, optical navigation, star detection, and attitude/pose estimation support. You will support image conditioning techniques such as calibration, distortion correction, dark-frame correction, and image normalization. Working closely with GNC and flight software teams, you will define algorithm performance requirements including accuracy, latency, update rate, robustness, fault tolerance, and compute/resource constraints.
You will develop test tools, simulation environments, and analysis scripts to evaluate algorithm performance using synthetic imagery, lab imagery, ground test data, and flight-like datasets. During sensor bring-up, ground testing, environmental testing, and in-flight operations, you will debug and tune vision software. You will contribute to fault detection, robustness, and recovery logic for challenging conditions such as poor lighting, stray light, saturation, blur, dropped frames, hot pixels, occlusions, image noise, and unexpected scene content. A critical aspect of the role is designing algorithms and data pipelines that operate within constrained CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth, timing, and power budgets.
Required qualifications include a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field, plus 2+ years of experience writing C++ code for embedded systems, preferably in imaging or robotic applications. You should have experience implementing image processing, estimation, numerical, or signal processing algorithms, and familiarity with bare-metal or RTOS-based software development.
