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Flight Software Architect Verified today

The Exploration Company · Munich, Germany · Software · first seen 2026-10-18
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About the role

The Flight Software Architect plays a key role in defining and maintaining the software architecture for our spacecraft flight software. You will ensure that the flight software architecture meets mission needs, system-level requirements, and safety and reliability objectives, while remaining scalable, maintainable, and suitable for the evolving needs of our spacecraft platforms. Working closely with Flight Software, Systems Engineering, Avionics, GNC, Mission Operations, and other functional disciplines, you will drive architectural decisions, technical consistency, and the integration of software across the spacecraft.

Your responsibilities

  • Define, develop, and maintain the overall flight software architecture, including software components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models, ensuring alignment with spacecraft system architecture and mission objectives.
  • Drive key architectural decisions and establish design principles, technical standards, and best practices for flight software development. Provide technical guidance to software engineers and ensure consistency across software components and development activities.
  • Define and coordinate software interfaces with avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communication systems, and other spacecraft subsystems. Ensure robust integration across functional disciplines and support the resolution of cross-system technical challenges.
  • Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, and interface specifications. Ensure traceability between requirements, architecture, implementation, and verification.
  • Ensure that architectural decisions address fault tolerance, robustness, timing constraints, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, and overall spacecraft reliability. Contribute to safety analyses, failure management strategies, and the definition of appropriate software verification and validation approaches.
  • Identify and mitigate architectural risks, assess technical trade-offs, and support design reviews, integration campaigns, and verification activities. Ensure that the architecture is validated against mission requirements and that critical technical assumptions are verified early in the development lifecycle.
  • Act as a technical reference for flight software architecture, facilitating alignment between Flight Software, Systems Engineering, Avionics, GNC, Mission Operations, and external partners. Communicate architectural decisions, constraints, and trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and project stakeholders.

What we are looking for

  • 10-15 years of professional experience in software engineering, including substantial experience in flight software, embedded software, or safety- and mission-critical systems.
  • Proven experience defining and evolving software architectures for complex critical software systems, ideally for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or other aerospace applications.
  • Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software, operating systems, hardware-software interfaces, resource-constrained computing, and distributed or fault-tolerant systems.
  • Experience translating system-level requirements into software architectures, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
  • A solid understanding of software integration, testing, verification and validation, and configuration and change management in a complex engineering environment.
  • Experience with architectural trade-off analysis, technical risk management, and making sound engineering decisions under performance, reliability, schedule, and resource constraints.
  • The ability to work effectively across multiple engineering disciplines and align stakeholders around clear technical solutions.
  • Strong structured thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to simplify complex technical challenges into robust and maintainable architectures.
  • Excellent technical communication skills, with the ability to explain architectural decisions, document design rationale, and provide technical guidance to multidisciplinary teams.
  • A strong ownership mindset, a pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and a passion for developing reliable software that enables humanity's exploration of space.