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Varda Space Industries is building commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing systems, reentry capsules, and satellite buses. The Senior Space Mission Software Engineer will own the critical ground segment software platform that enables spacecraft operations, working at the intersection of telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, mission control interfaces, and test automation.
Key responsibilities include developing and maintaining high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding with deterministic behavior for real-time operations and post-flight analysis. You'll deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that optimize operations time and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit phases.
The role involves building simulation and test automation tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based tests, enabling fast iteration for avionics and operations teams. You'll design and productionize 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.
You'll also create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks, implementing safe rollout/rollback strategies and air-gapped deployment approaches. This is a hands-on role working directly with flight software, avionics, RF/ground systems, and mission operations teams.
Required: Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, or engineering (or equivalent technical experience in safety-critical software); 5+ years developing spacecraft or similar safety-critical software; expertise in Python with strong language fundamentals; experience with C/C++, real-time systems, and spacecraft software architecture.
