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Salary: USD 144,020 - 184,026 / annual
Varda Space Industries is building commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing, reentry capsules, and satellite buses. The company operates at the intersection of spacecraft operations, telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, and mission control.
As a Ground Systems Software Engineer II, you will own Varda's critical ground segment software platform that enables spacecraft operations. You'll work hands-on with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission operations teams.
Key Responsibilities:
• Own Ground Segment Services: Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. Ensure deterministic behavior for real-time operations and post-flight analysis.
• Mission Control Interfaces: Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that optimize "ops time" and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit operations phases.
• Simulation and Test Automation: Build tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests—enabling fast, safe iteration for avionics, guidance/navigation/control (GNC), and operations teams.
• Build the Mission Platform: Design, implement, and productionize software for mission and ground software teams. Standardize CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, and observability—all delivered as self-service tooling.
• Deployments Across Environments: Create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks. Implement safe rollout/rollback strategies and air-gapped or limited-connectivity deployment approaches.
Requirements:
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software.
• 3+ years of experience in the development of spacecraft or similar safety-critical software.
• Expertise with Python development and strong understanding of language concepts.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services—low-latency messaging, time-series and relational stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability experience: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Docker/Kubernetes; release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.
Preferred Skills:
• Proficiency in C++, Ansible, and/or NiceGUI.
• Experience with data acquisition (DAQ) and closed-loop control in lab/test environments.
• Prior work on CI/testing/simulation/data tools integrated with flight software teams.
• Experience with requirements, test, and certification artifacts from safety-critical or certified workflows.
• Knowledge of ground systems standards and security in mission networks.
• Experience building mission-grade UIs with structured command workflows, alarming, and situational awareness.
Note: ITAR requirements apply—only U.S. persons (citizens, lawful permanent residents, or those admitted as refugees/granted asylum) are eligible.
