Senior Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems Verified today

About Star Catcher

Star Catcher is building the first energy grid in space to power the orbital economy. We are developing space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, an orbital power grid that allows spacecraft to wirelessly receive energy instead of generating all their own power.

The Role

As Senior Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems, you will lead ground segment software architecture and co-own flight/ground interfaces for mission operations. You'll work from our Jacksonville, Florida office on production systems that command and monitor spacecraft.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead ground segment software architecture and co-own flight/ground interfaces, including telemetry visualization, command planning, and data processing pipelines for mission operations
• Lead full software development lifecycle execution for ground and mission systems, including requirements flow-down, design, hardware/software integration and test, verification, transition to production, and fielded product support
• Architect real-time and near-real-time telemetry ingestion, processing, and storage pipelines, including frame/packet decommutation, time-series storage, and limit-checking/alerting for spacecraft health and status
• Define command planning, sequencing, and validation workflows, ensuring safe command uplink and interfacing with ground station scheduling and pass-planning systems
• Define interfaces between ground tooling and spacecraft systems alongside embedded/flight software and electrical engineering teams, including telemetry/command dictionaries and interface control documents
• Set standards for ground software architecture, APIs, service-oriented design, and CI/CD practices, including containerization and deployment strategy
• Establish observability practices (logging, metrics, alerting) for ground and mission systems to support on-call operations
• Mentor ground/mission systems engineers and lead design reviews
• Support internal software architecture and code quality practices across ground and non-embedded systems

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline
• 10+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, or engineering tooling), with demonstrated experience owning system architecture
• Proficiency in one or more of Python, C++, Go, or similar languages
• Experience with databases (relational and time-series), REST/gRPC APIs, and service-oriented/microservices architecture
• Experience with distributed systems design, software/computer architecture, and structured workflow tools supporting requirements management, configuration management, and change control

Technical Expertise

• Experience with telemetry and command processing standards (e.g., CCSDS, XTCE, or similar) and real-time data streaming (e.g., message queues or pub/sub systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code for deployment of ground software
• Experience with observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for monitoring mission-critical ground systems
• Familiarity with mission operations concepts, including pass scheduling, command sequencing, and anomaly/limit monitoring
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, or GovCloud equivalents) and CI/CD pipelines
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows

Desired Skills

• Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems for spacecraft or other real-time platforms
• Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment
• Experience with network storage systems, Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand
• Working knowledge of authentication and access-control schemes (e.g., RADIUS, LDAP)
• Experience with embedded security and encryption for data and command protection
• DevSecOps and test automation experience using Python or similar languages
• Familiarity with Linux development environments and tooling
• Experience in a fast-paced startup or early-stage engineering environment
• Experience mentoring engineers or establishing team-wide software standards

Benefits

Highly competitive benefits package including comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement plan, life insurance, and paid parental leave.

Employment Requirements

All offers of employment 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 the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (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 the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.