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Varda Space Industries is building commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing systems and reentry capsules. The Mission Software team owns the critical ground segment software platform that enables spacecraft operations, bridging telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, mission control, and test automation.
In this role, you will develop and maintain high-reliability ground segment services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. You'll design operator-grade mission control interfaces and dashboards that optimize operations time and reduce cognitive load during integration, test, and on-orbit phases.
You will build simulation and test automation tools enabling flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based tests—allowing fast, safe iteration for avionics, guidance/navigation/control, and operations teams. A key responsibility is building the mission platform itself: designing and productionizing software infrastructure including CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, and observability tooling delivered as self-service systems.
You'll also create robust deployment patterns across lab benches, test stands, and mission networks, implementing safe rollout/rollback strategies and handling air-gapped or limited-connectivity deployment scenarios.
Required: Bachelor's in computer science, math, physics, or engineering (or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software). 3+ years developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software. Expert-level Python development with strong language fundamentals. Deep systems knowledge: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability. Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services with low-latency messaging and time-series databases.
Varda is headquartered in El Segundo with offices in Washington DC and Huntsville, AL. The team includes veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, major pharma, and Silicon Valley, backed by top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, and Founders Fund.
