Senior Embedded & Flight Software Engineer Verified today

About Star Catcher

Star Catcher is building the world's first orbital energy grid: the Star Catcher Network. Spacecraft connect into this network and receive conditioned energy via their existing solar arrays, requiring no retrofit. The network delivers power from tens of Watts to tens of thousands of Watts.

The Role

You will support development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network orbital power grid. This role encompasses onboard flight and payload software, embedded subsystem control, and ground systems that support development, integration, and mission operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and validate real-time embedded software for spacecraft payload and subsystem control. Develop firmware, device drivers, and middleware running on bare-metal and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), with emphasis on determinism and maintainability.
• Develop software supporting spacecraft bus management, including command and telemetry processing, subsystem coordination, and onboard autonomy. Implement robust interfaces using SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, RS-422, SpaceWire and CCSDS standards.
• Collaborate with electrical and hardware teams on board bring-up, bootloader development, backplane and compute-module integration (e.g., SpaceVPX/VPX), and peripheral integration. Implement Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategies, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring.
• Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
• Design and maintain software tools supporting hardware bring-up, automated testing, mission operations, and telemetry visualization. Develop automation tools using Python, C++, or similar languages.
• Develop automated unit, integration, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test suites. Perform fault-injection testing and simulation to verify software robustness under off-nominal conditions. Participate in environmental test campaigns including thermal-vacuum, vibration, and EMI/EMC.
• Design scalable, maintainable software architectures using modern software engineering practices including CI/CD pipelines, static analysis tools, automated builds, and structured code reviews.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers while establishing software development standards and engineering processes.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline.
• 7+ years professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems, with proven track record of delivering complex projects from architecture through deployment.
• Expert proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, with solid understanding of memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling.
• Experience developing software on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using Real-Time Operating Systems (RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments.
• Strong understanding of standard embedded communication protocols and serial interfaces.
• Familiarity with backplane-based embedded architectures (SpaceVPX, VPX, CompactPCI Serial) and integrating compute modules within multi-board chassis systems.
• Comfortable with hardware-software integration using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and protocol analyzers.
• Experience with Git and collaborative software development workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing software that has flown in space, or familiarity with radiation-mitigation strategies in software (memory scrubbing, checkpointing, ECC memory, redundancy schemes, watchdog timers).
• Experience developing software on Embedded Linux platforms.
• Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC architectures.
• Familiarity with safety-critical, mission-assurance software development standards or flight architectures (NASA cFE/cFS, MISRA C/C++, DO-178C, NASA NPR 7150.2).
• Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments (Docker).
• Familiarity with ground support equipment, mission operations tooling, or telemetry/command software.
• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.

Additional Information

All offers of employment at Star Catcher are contingent upon results of a thorough background check and your ability to provide proof of eligibility to work in the US.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including ITAR, you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Star Catcher offers comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement plan, life insurance, and paid parental leave.