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Salary: USD 175,000 - 225,000 / annual
Turion Space is building critical infrastructure for the space economy through vertically integrated hardware and software. The company develops DROID, a line of space vehicles, and Starfire, a comprehensive software suite for simulation, modeling, planning, and operations.
As a Staff Ground Software Engineer, you will architect, automate, and operate the mission-critical infrastructure powering Turion's spacecraft operations. You will ensure ground systems are highly available, observable, secure, and scalable, enabling operators to command satellites, process high-volume downlinks, and respond quickly to on-orbit events.
You'll work across the full software and infrastructure lifecycle, influencing architectural decisions, developing core platform services, improving reliability, and driving engineering best practices. Key technical challenges include orchestrating high-rate telemetry ingestion, building fault-tolerant services for mission-critical workflows, enabling fully automated deployments and testing pipelines, delivering deep observability into system performance and spacecraft behavior, and safeguarding command paths and operational access control.
You will build mission control infrastructure including core components of a scalable, cloud-native platform for spacecraft operations; automated deployment and operational tooling for satellite fleets; reusable infrastructure modules and shared platform capabilities; and observability, telemetry, and alerting systems for real-time operations.
Key responsibilities include designing, automating, and operating infrastructure for spacecraft operations; defining architectural direction for mission-critical systems including autonomy, data pipelines, and real-time processing; building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, deployment frameworks, and environment-level automation; establishing reliability and performance standards across ground systems; leading and participating in on-call rotations for high-availability production environments; partnering with mission operators to translate operational needs into reliable services and tools; driving engineering excellence through documentation, reviews, and technical mentorship; and improving the accessibility, efficiency, and reliability of satellite operations at scale.
This is a full-time, exempt, on-site position in Irvine, California. You may be asked to support alternate shifts, extended shifts, and/or travel during peak work periods.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent experience
- 8+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience, including ownership of major components or services
- Strong experience with distributed systems
- Expertise with cloud-native and container-based architectures
- Deep Kubernetes experience (design, operation, and tuning)
- Significant experience operating live, customer-facing, cloud-hosted systems
- Demonstrated leadership in on-call for high-availability environments
- Must be able to obtain and maintain a TS/SCI clearance
- Must be a U.S. citizen, national, lawful permanent resident, Refugee, or Asylee (ITAR requirements)
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Proficiency in Go
- Expertise in multiple cloud stacks (e.g., AWS + Azure)
- Experience with real-time data processing or data engineering pipelines
- Proficiency in database administration
- Interest in space systems and mission operations
