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K2 Space is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, backed by $450M in funding from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and others. The company is mass-producing advanced satellite platforms for missions from low Earth orbit to deep space, capitalizing on the era of heavy-lift launch vehicles and mass abundance.
As a Flight Software Engineer, you will develop and verify mission-critical software for some of the largest spacecraft ever built. The software team primarily uses Rust, chosen for its safety and correctness properties across the entire stack—from guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) algorithms to application software on flight computers and embedded microcontroller code.
In your first six months, you will develop core pieces of the software architecture, including strategies for fault tolerance, real-time control, and telemetry downlink. Within your first year, you will implement larger software systems and begin verification using software and hardware-in-the-loop simulators. By year two, you will operate your code on multiple spacecraft in demanding missions.
Key responsibilities include: creating software architecture for real-time, fault-tolerant control of 20kW+ spacecraft; developing applications for propulsion, attitude control, thermal, power, and communications systems; designing state machines for robust spacecraft operation; authoring drivers for microcontroller peripherals and sensors; building deployment tools for rapid, quality code releases; performing data analysis and anomaly investigation; supporting subsystem integration and testing; and maintaining infrastructure for reliable development and testing.
Required qualifications: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, or STEM discipline (or 3+ years professional software engineering experience); development experience in C/C++ or Rust.
Nice-to-have skills include spacecraft flight software experience, Linux systems programming and driver development, CI/CD systems, hard real-time embedded systems (bare-metal or RTOS), no_std Rust, electronics and computer architecture knowledge, and state machine development experience.
