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Varda Space Industries is building commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing, reentry capsules, and satellite buses. The Mission Software team owns the critical ground segment software platform that enables spacecraft operations, operating at the intersection of telemetry, commanding, data acquisition, mission control interfaces, and test automation.
As a Senior Spacecraft Mission Software Engineer, you will own and develop high-reliability ground segment services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. You'll design and deliver operator-grade mission control UIs 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 to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based tests, enabling fast iteration for avionics and operations teams. A key responsibility is designing and implementing the mission platform itself—standardizing CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation frameworks, test harnesses, and observability as self-service tooling for mission and ground software teams.
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 for limited-connectivity environments.
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 systems fundamentals (concurrency, networking, performance, reliability). Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services. Varda is headquartered in El Segundo with offices in Washington DC and Huntsville, AL. The company was founded in 2021 by veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and major pharma, backed by Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and others.
