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Northwood Space is a modern space infrastructure company building a global network of phased array ground stations for satellite communications. The company designs, builds, and deploys scalable systems for national security, global connectivity, and disaster response missions.
You will lead the software engineering for Prism, Northwood's parabolic dish product line. This is a full-stack ownership role spanning embedded software running on the antenna, backend services that command and monitor it, and the interfaces between them. The most interesting work sits at the seam between embedded and server-side systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own Prism's software end-to-end: embedded antenna software, backend control and monitoring services, and the contracts between them.
- Set design direction across the embedded/backend boundary: where state lives, what control loops own, how commands and telemetry are modeled.
- Make the develop-test-integrate loop fast by building hardware-in-the-loop rigs, simulators, and test automation so changes are exercised against real and simulated hardware before deployment to sites.
- Own telemetry and automation: what the dish reports, calibration, health checks, fault detection and recovery.
- Define and version the interface Prism exposes to the platform (tasking, telemetry, state, diagnostics) and keep it stable for the Cloud team to build against.
- Lead a team of 2-5 engineers initially, growing to 10+. Set technical direction, mentor, review designs, and grow the team as scope expands.
- Collaborate with FPGA, DSP, RF, and mechanical engineers on where functionality belongs and what software must handle.
- Work hands-on in the lab and at sites when integration requires it.
Your scope includes everything that makes Prism a working, testable product: embedded software, device and control services, telemetry generation, calibration, fault detection and recovery, test rigs, simulation, and the versioned interface the platform uses. You do not own the operational platform (Cloud team handles scheduling, orchestration, fleet configuration, network-wide state, operator tooling, and customer APIs) or other hardware product lines.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of professional software development experience.
- 3+ years building production software that controls, monitors, or automates physical hardware (ground systems, robotics, industrial automation, test equipment, or similar edge environments).
- Experience on both sides of the embedded/server boundary: you have written embedded software and the backend that drives it, with views on where the line belongs.
- Engineering leadership or tech lead experience with a track record of mentoring engineers and shipping as a team.
- Deep experience designing how services communicate: interface and API design, state machines, failure handling across process and machine boundaries.
- Strong systems programming skills in languages suited to concurrent, high-reliability software (Rust, Go, C++, or similar).
- Experience building test infrastructure alongside features: HITL rigs, simulators, automated integration against real hardware.
- A reliability mindset: you instrument what you build, design for failure, and treat automated testing as first-class.
Preferred qualifications:
- Familiarity with RF systems, antenna control, timing and synchronization, or satellite communications.
- Exposure to FPGA or DSP work—enough to partner well and make good partitioning calls, even if you don't write RTL.
- Experience operating fleets of remote or edge systems: deployment, configuration management, over-the-air updates, rollback at scale.
- Experience with high-rate telemetry, data capture, or streaming pipelines at the edge.
- Experience leading engineers across multiple disciplines.
- Comfort working hands-on in a lab or at a site alongside hardware, RF, and operations engineers.
Note: To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations (ITAR), you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
