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Varda Space Industries is building commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing systems, reentry capsules, and satellite buses. 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.
As a Senior Ground Systems Software Engineer, you will own high-reliability ground segment services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. You'll develop operator-grade mission control interfaces and dashboards that optimize operations time and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit phases.
You will build simulation and test automation tools enabling flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based tests for avionics, guidance/navigation/control, and operations teams. A key responsibility is designing and productionizing the mission platform itself—standardizing CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, and observability as self-service tooling for mission and ground software teams.
You'll create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks, implementing safe rollout/rollback strategies and air-gapped or limited-connectivity deployment approaches. This role requires hands-on collaboration with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission operations teams.
Required: Bachelor's in computer science, math, physics, or engineering (or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software). 5+ 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 (low-latency messaging, time-series databases). Familiarity with spacecraft operations, telemetry protocols, or mission control systems is highly valued.
