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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 focused on Ground & Mission Systems, supporting the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain ground segment tools, dashboards, and test infrastructure supporting hardware bring-up and build tracking
- Work closely with cross-functional engineering teams to develop and evaluate interfaces between ground tooling, hardware, and flight software
- Develop APIs, services, and data pipelines connecting ground systems, test benches, and engineering tools under established architecture
- Support development of telemetry ingestion, processing, and visualization tooling, including decommutation and time-series storage of spacecraft health and status data
- Support command planning and validation tooling under established architecture and safety constraints
- Support integration and test campaigns with automated test and data-processing tooling, including hardware-in-the-loop test benches
- Participate in design and architecture reviews across the software development lifecycle
- Document software architecture, APIs, and operational procedures
- Build and maintain unit/integration tests for CI/CD
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline
- 5+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, or engineering tooling)
- Proficiency in one or more of Python, C++, Go, or similar languages
- Experience with databases (especially time-series databases) and REST/gRPC APIs
- Comfortable working across the stack, from backend services to internal tooling and UIs
- Working knowledge of containerization (e.g., Docker) and CI/CD pipelines
- Familiarity with message queues or pub/sub systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ) for real-time data handling
- Exposure to telemetry/command data formats and processing (e.g., CCSDS, XTCE, or similar)
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows
Desired Skills:
- Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems
- Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines
- Familiarity with spacecraft or aerospace systems
- DevSecOps and test automation experience using Python or similar languages
- Familiarity with release engineering and configuration/change management practices
- Familiarity with network storage, Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand
- Working knowledge of authentication schemes (e.g., RADIUS, LDAP) for access-controlled ground tooling
Note: ITAR compliance required; must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
