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Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company building rockets, spacecraft, and critical subsystems for commercial, government, and defense missions. The Space Systems team designs and manufactures satellites and satellite components including solar panels, flight software, reaction wheels, star trackers, separation systems, and radios.
As a Senior Flight Software Engineer in the Space Systems Software team, you will serve as a technical expert across three core areas: support for current missions in orbit or development; next-generation flight software for future large autonomous satellite constellations; and embedded software for hardware product lines including the Gauss thruster, reaction wheels, and Frontier radios.
Key responsibilities include:
• Architect flight software solutions in collaboration with avionics hardware, systems, GNC, and operations teams, balancing effort across anomaly resolution, sustaining engineering, next-generation constellation development, and embedded product lines.
• Work with design engineers to assess conceptual designs, perform system trade studies, develop integrated solutions, and formulate system margin strategy with focus on autonomy, fault management, constellation-scale operability, and software component reuse.
• Develop and maintain robust regression testing frameworks spanning flight and embedded software product lines to enable rapid, reliable verification across missions, constellation builds, and component releases.
• Provide technical advisory, guidance, and direction across all three domains, identifying and mitigating technical risks.
You will combine technical expertise in avionics hardware, avionics software, GNC, and communications with broader awareness of spacecraft disciplines including propulsion, thermal, power, structures, and mechanisms. Direct experience in development, integration, and on-orbit operation of aerospace systems is expected, along with exposure to embedded software on resource-constrained hardware.
Day-to-day work includes microcontroller programming in C/C++ on 32-bit Arm Cortex-M devices (Vorago Cortex-M4, Microchip Cortex-M7), developing for memory and code-space constrained targets, writing portable endianness-independent code, and working from datasheets and schematics in collaboration with electrical, systems, and test engineers.
