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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, enabling them to operate longer and with greater capability by "plugging into" an orbital power grid rather than relying solely on onboard power generation.
You will be a Senior Software Engineer responsible for ground and mission systems that support space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network orbital infrastructure. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will architect and own critical systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead ground segment software architecture and co-own flight/ground interfaces, including telemetry visualization, command planning, and data processing pipelines for mission operations
- Own the full software development lifecycle for ground and mission systems: requirements flow-down, design, hardware/software integration, test, verification, production transition, and fielded support
- Architect real-time and near-real-time telemetry ingestion, processing, and storage pipelines with frame/packet decommutation, time-series storage, and limit-checking/alerting for spacecraft health
- Define command planning, sequencing, and validation workflows to ensure safe command uplink and integration with ground station scheduling
- Define interfaces between ground tooling and spacecraft systems alongside embedded/flight software and electrical engineering teams
- Set standards for ground software architecture, APIs, service-oriented design, and CI/CD practices including containerization and deployment
- Establish observability practices (logging, metrics, alerting) for mission-critical ground systems
- Mentor ground/mission systems engineers and lead design reviews
- Support internal software architecture and code quality practices across non-embedded systems
This role requires deep technical expertise in production software systems combined with mission operations knowledge. You will work in a fast-paced startup environment building infrastructure for space.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline
- 10+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, engineering tooling) with demonstrated experience owning system architecture
- Proficiency in Python, C++, Go, or similar languages
- Experience with relational and time-series databases, REST/gRPC APIs, and service-oriented/microservices architecture
- Experience with distributed systems design, software/computer architecture, and structured workflow tools for requirements management, configuration management, and change control
- Experience with telemetry and command processing standards (CCSDS, XTCE, or similar) and real-time data streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ)
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code
- Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for mission-critical systems
- Familiarity with mission operations concepts including pass scheduling, command sequencing, and anomaly monitoring
- Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure, GovCloud) and CI/CD pipelines
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows
DESIRED SKILLS:
- Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems for spacecraft or real-time platforms
- Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment
- Experience with network storage systems, Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand
- Working knowledge of authentication and access-control schemes (RADIUS, LDAP)
- Experience with embedded security and encryption
- DevSecOps and test automation experience
- Familiarity with Linux development environments
- Experience in fast-paced startup or early-stage engineering environments
- Experience mentoring engineers or establishing team-wide software standards
NOTE: ITAR compliance required—must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
