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. Instead of spacecraft generating all their own power, Star Catcher is developing technology to wirelessly beam energy to spacecraft's solar panels when and where they need it.

The Role

You will join Star Catcher Industries in Jacksonville, Florida as a Software Engineer supporting 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 and 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 TSDB, 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.
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows.

Desired Experience

• Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems.
• Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment.
• Exposure to telemetry/command data formats and processing (e.g., CCSDS, XTCE, or similar).
• 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.

What We Offer

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage; 401(k) retirement plan; life insurance; and paid parental leave.

Work Requirements

All offers of employment are contingent upon a background check and 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 the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.