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The Exploration Company is building spacecraft for humanity and seeks a Flight Software Architect to define and maintain the software architecture for spacecraft flight software systems.
In this role, you will drive architectural decisions and technical consistency across flight software development, ensuring the architecture meets mission needs, system-level requirements, and safety and reliability objectives while remaining scalable and maintainable.
Key responsibilities include:
• Define, develop, and maintain overall flight software architecture, including software components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models aligned with spacecraft system architecture and mission objectives.
• Drive key architectural decisions and establish design principles, technical standards, and best practices for flight software development. Provide technical guidance to software engineers and ensure consistency across components.
• Define and coordinate software interfaces with avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communication systems, and other spacecraft subsystems. Ensure robust integration across functional disciplines.
• Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, and interface specifications. Ensure traceability between requirements, architecture, implementation, and verification.
• Ensure architectural decisions address fault tolerance, robustness, timing constraints, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, and overall spacecraft reliability. Contribute to safety analyses and verification approaches.
• Identify and mitigate architectural risks, assess technical trade-offs, and support design reviews, integration campaigns, and verification activities.
• Act as technical reference for flight software architecture, facilitating alignment between Flight Software, Systems Engineering, Avionics, GNC, Mission Operations, and external partners including ESA.
The company emphasizes agility, open collaboration, transparency about risks, and a mission-driven culture focused on democratizing space exploration. Relocation assistance and visa sponsorship are provided.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 10–15 years of professional experience in software engineering, including substantial experience in flight software, embedded software, or safety- and mission-critical systems.
• Proven experience defining and evolving software architectures for complex critical software systems, ideally for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or aerospace applications.
• Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software, operating systems, hardware–software interfaces, resource-constrained computing, and distributed or fault-tolerant systems.
• Experience translating system-level requirements into software architectures, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
• Solid understanding of software integration, testing, verification and validation, and configuration and change management in complex engineering environments.
• Experience with architectural trade-off analysis, technical risk management, and making sound engineering decisions under performance, reliability, schedule, and resource constraints.
• Ability to work effectively across multiple engineering disciplines and align stakeholders around clear technical solutions.
• Strong structured thinking, analytical skills, and ability to simplify complex technical challenges into robust and maintainable architectures.
• Excellent technical communication skills with ability to explain architectural decisions, document design rationale, and provide technical guidance to multidisciplinary teams.
• Strong ownership mindset, pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and passion for developing reliable software for space exploration.
