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Star Catcher is building the first energy grid in space to power the orbital economy. The company is developing technology to wirelessly beam energy to spacecraft's existing solar panels, enabling spacecraft to "plug" into an orbital power grid rather than generating all their own power. This role is a Senior Software Engineer focused on embedded and flight systems for space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead flight software architecture across programs and co-own cross-domain system interfaces with hardware, FPGA, and systems leads
- Own full software development lifecycle execution for flight software, including requirements flow-down, decomposition, allocation to design, hardware/software integration, design verification and qualification, transition to production, and fielded product support
- Set Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategy, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring standards
- Contribute to software development standards, coding practices, and institutional knowledge as the team grows
- Mentor embedded/flight software engineers and lead design reviews
- Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure complete traceability from requirements through flight qualification
- Maintain software quality through code review and unit and integration testing
This is an early-stage opportunity to be part of a team building new space infrastructure at scale. The role requires deep technical expertise in embedded systems, real-time software, and space-qualified development practices, with significant mentorship and architectural leadership responsibilities.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline
- 10+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems, with proven track record of delivering complex projects from architecture through deployment
- Expert proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, with solid understanding of memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling
- Strong experience with software/hardware co-design, distributed systems design, and software/computer architecture
- Experience developing software on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using Real-Time Operating Systems (RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, LynxOS, INTEGRITY, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments
- Familiarity with backplane-based embedded architectures (SpaceVPX, VPX, CompactPCI Serial) and integrating compute modules within multi-board chassis systems
- Comfortable with hardware-software integration using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and protocol analyzers
- Working knowledge of Bash/Python for build, test, and release automation, configuration/change management, and debug/trace analysis tools
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows
- Ability to operate in fast-paced, early-stage environment and solve ambiguous engineering challenges analytically
Desired Skills:
- Experience developing software that has flown in space or familiarity with radiation-mitigation strategies (memory scrubbing, checkpointing, ECC memory, redundancy schemes, watchdog timers)
- Experience with Embedded Linux platforms
- Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC or system-on-chip architectures
- Familiarity with safety-critical or mission-assurance software practices (MISRA C/C++, DO-178C or equivalent, NASA NPR 7150.2) and common flight architectures such as NASA cFE/cFS
- Experience with embedded security and encryption for command and telemetry data protection
- Experience developing or integrating board support packages (BSPs) and device drivers
- Experience with Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2) or similar protocols for time synchronization across distributed avionics
- Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments (Docker), including DevSecOps and test automation using Python
- Familiarity with structured workflow tools supporting requirements management, configuration management, and change control
- Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field
Note: ITAR compliance required—must be U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from U.S. Department of State.
