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Salary: USD 196,720 - 236,484 / annual
Cowboy Space Corp., founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt (co-founder of Robinhood) and backed by leading investors, is building infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. The company operates satellites in low Earth orbit to collect sunlight, enable on-orbit compute, transmit energy via infrared lasers, and deliver secure, high-bandwidth optical data.
As a Space Datacenter Networking Engineer, you will design the high-performance fabric that allows accelerators in orbit to operate as a cluster. You will own the compute, storage, management, and diagnostic networks inside the payload and their interfaces to spacecraft communications and ground systems. A core principle: degraded links must not require technician intervention. You will design performance, telemetry, failure isolation, and recovery into the network architecture, then prove that behavior with representative workloads and injected faults.
Key Responsibilities:
• Own topology, protocols, addressing, routing, performance targets, and failure domains for Space Datacenter networks.
• Select and integrate switches, adapters, interconnects, cabling, and management components.
• Model and measure collective performance, congestion, latency, availability, and workload sensitivity.
• Define management and diagnostic paths that remain available through compute-fabric failures.
• Build telemetry that identifies marginal links and components before they fail.
• Develop isolation, rerouting, and graceful-degradation behavior with firmware and software teams.
• Build representative test fabrics, automate validation, inject faults, and lead root-cause analysis.
• Define spacecraft and ground interfaces and qualify critical components for the mission environment.
In your first year, you will establish the baseline Space Datacenter network topology, interfaces, and performance model; demonstrate representative collective-workload performance on an integrated test fabric; and prove detection, isolation, and recovery for network failure modes that matter in flight.
Requirements:
• 5+ years designing or operating high-performance AI, HPC, storage, or low-latency networks.
• Deep experience with InfiniBand, RoCE, high-performance Ethernet, or a comparable compute fabric.
• Strong understanding of topology, congestion control, collective communication, failure domains, and telemetry.
• Hands-on experience configuring, benchmarking, and debugging network hardware.
• Proficiency in Python or another language used for test automation and telemetry analysis.
• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
• Rail-optimized network design for distributed training or inference.
• Embedded, remote, power-constrained, or radiation-exposed networking experience.
• Switch or adapter firmware, FPGA, kernel-driver, or low-level network-software experience.
• Automated fault injection, health scoring, adaptive routing, or link isolation.
• Spacecraft communications, optical inter-satellite links, or ground-link interface experience.
Note: ITAR compliance required. Applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
