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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" a grid rather than generating all their own power. This role is a Software Engineer - Embedded & Flight Systems based in Jacksonville, Florida, supporting the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities:
- Implement and validate real-time embedded software for spacecraft payload and subsystem control under established architecture
- Work with cross-functional engineering teams to develop and evaluate hardware-software interfaces and operational performance requirements
- Develop device drivers, middleware, and board bring-up support alongside hardware teams, including APIs, board support packages (BSPs), and health/status reporting
- Build automated unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop test suites using test frameworks and software coverage tools (e.g., Python-based frameworks)
- Support fault-injection testing and environmental test campaigns (TVAC, vibration, EMI/EMC)
- Implement communication interfaces using protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, RS-422, SpaceWire, and CCSDS standards
- Support hardware and software integration and test activities across mission computing and memory systems
- Participate in design and architecture reviews across the software development lifecycle
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline
- 5+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems
- Strong proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, with working knowledge of memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, real-time scheduling, software/hardware co-design, and software/computer architecture
- Experience developing software on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using RTOS (RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, LynxOS, INTEGRITY, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments
- Comfortable with hardware-software integration using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG debuggers
- Experience with Git and collaborative software development workflows
- Working knowledge of Bash/Python for scripting, test automation, and tooling
Desired Skills:
- Exposure to space flight software or radiation-mitigation strategies
- Experience with Embedded Linux
- Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing for FPGA/SoC architectures
- Familiarity with safety-critical or mission-assurance coding standards (MISRA C/C++, NASA cFE/cFS)
- DevSecOps and test automation experience using Python or similar languages
- Experience with embedded security and encryption
- Familiarity with release engineering, configuration/change management, and debug/trace analysis
- Familiarity with embedded communications interfaces and network debugging
- Exposure to embedded processor architectures, peripheral integration, resource constraints, and hardware/software debugging
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.
