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Salary: USD 192,000 - 213,000 / annual
Muon Space is building a constellation of infrared imaging satellites for global wildfire detection, weather monitoring, and space-based environmental monitoring. The IR Data Products team processes spacecraft multispectral imaging data into analytics and data products for diverse stakeholders.
You will join the calibration team to build production software systems that deliver calibration and image processing of multispectral infrared data from Muon's IR missions. This is a data science role with strong software engineering focus: you will translate calibration algorithms into hardened production pipelines complete with monitoring, alerting, unit and integration testing, and automated diagnostic visualizations.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, build, and operate production-grade calibration and image-processing pipelines for FireSat and SBEM multispectral infrared missions
- Translate calibration algorithms (dark/offset correction, non-uniformity correction, radiometric gain/linearity, bad-pixel identification, band-to-band registration) from research prototypes into hardened, well-tested production code
- Own testing strategy across unit, integration, and regression suites using representative lab and on-orbit datasets
- Analyze pre-launch (thermal-vacuum, integrating sphere) and on-orbit calibration data to derive, validate, and trend calibration coefficients
- Build monitoring, alerting, and automated diagnostic visualizations surfacing calibration accuracy, noise, uniformity, and image-quality metrics
- Contribute to CI/CD, deployment, containerization, and observability tooling for reliable production calibration services
- Partner with calibration scientists and IR Instrument team on pre-launch and on-orbit calibration campaigns for SBEM instruments
- Drive engineering best practices: code review, version control, documentation, versioned coefficient/lookup-table management, test coverage improvement
- Work cross-functionally with scientists, engineers, and product teams to ensure scientific quality, quantitative validation, and radiometric integrity of IR data products
- Learn new topics as needed (measurement techniques, geospatial data engineering, customer domain implications)
This is a hybrid role requiring three days per week on-site in Denver, CO. As the FireSat constellation scales, the role will expand to span both FireSat Initial Operating Capability commissioning and Muon's Space-Based Environmental Monitoring program. Near-term focus: build and operate calibration software for three FireSat IOC satellites and stand up automated testing/monitoring. In parallel: develop production calibration infrastructure for SBEM instruments (next-generation sensor suite with additional infrared bands and more stringent radiometric requirements). As SBEM advances toward 2027 launch, you will collaborate on pre-launch calibration software and test harnesses, then lead deployment and on-orbit operation of SBEM calibration pipelines.
REQUIREMENTS:
- PhD with 3+ years, MS with 6+ years, or BS with 8+ years of industry experience
- 4+ years of experience calibrating imaging instruments
- Hands-on experience with complex data from new imaging instruments
- Proven track record shipping and operating production data or analytics pipelines for scientific data (monitoring, logging, alerting, automated testing), ideally in remote sensing, calibration, or measurement-instrument context
- Demonstrated experience taking scientific/numerical algorithms (calibration, image-processing, signal-processing) from prototype to hardened, maintainable production code, including unit/integration test suite design and quantitative validation against reference data
- Exceptional Python software engineering skills: modern packaging, testing frameworks (pytest), version control, code review, CI/CD workflows
- Solid grounding in statistics, applied mathematics, and instrument physics to reason about calibration algorithms, radiometric error budgets, and diagnostics; ability to design meaningful automated quality visualizations
- Ability to work with distributed, interdisciplinary teams (scientists, engineers, data support)
- Ability to thrive in fast-paced startup environment
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with mid-wave infrared (MWIR) instruments and MWIR data processing
- Hands-on experience calibrating on-orbit imaging instruments (radiometric, spectral, geometric)
- Deep knowledge of remote sensing science and radiometric calibration, including SI-traceability and uncertainty analysis
- Experience with detector characterization (dark current, non-uniformity, linearity, noise, MTF, PRNU/DSNU)
- Calibration campaign design experience (blackbodies, integrating spheres, on-board calibrators, deep convective clouds, lunar/vicarious calibration sites)
- Geospatial data processing experience
- Familiarity with geospatial data tooling/formats (XArray, COG, NetCDF)
- Experience building automated visualization/dashboarding tools for scientific data (Plotly, Panel, Streamlit, Grafana)
- Containerization and workflow orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes, Airflow, Prefect, Argo)
- Cloud-native systems and infrastructure-as-code experience (AWS preferred)
- Experience with large TB-sized datasets and geospatial analytics domain expertise
Note: This position requires access to export-controlled information and ITAR/EAR compliance. Applicant must be a U.S. person (citizen, national, lawful permanent resident, refugee, or asylee) or eligible to access export-controlled information without authorization, or eligible and reasonably likely to obtain required export authorization.
