Director of Software

Albedo•Broomfield, CO

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Albedo is making Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) mainstream, building the infrastructure to usher every satellite mission set into this new orbital domain. We build buses, integrated satellites, and turnkey missions for customers to thrive in VLEO, between 250 km - 400 km, where proximity compounds performance and drag self-cleans debris. As part of the first 100 employees at Albedo, you will have a big impact on Albedo’s trajectory to proliferating VLEO — whether you’re advancing hardware to increase satellite longevity, scaling production for large constellations, building next-gen flight and ground software to push performance, or enabling missions that matter for national security and our day-to-day life here on earth. Albedo takes a first-principles approach — in space and in business. We move with speed, take calculated risks, and learn quickly. We use AI regularly to create leverage in every discipline across the company. We work in-person at our Broomfield CO HQ to maximize team and company productivity. We work hard and with urgency to compound our first-mover advantage. We're looking for builders who want to own outcomes, not tasks. Systems thinkers who balance precision with iteration while thinking about the big picture. Individuals who are energized by creating a category rather than competing in an existing one. You’ll join a team that has already proven what others said wasn’t feasible and is now scaling and upgrading our VLEO buses & payloads to serve mission sets across sensing, communications, and responsive operations.

Requirements

Twelve-plus years in real-time embedded, GNC, or flight software, with at least four leading software engineering managers
Deep fluency in deterministic flight or flight-like software: timing, scheduling, fault containment, C++ on RTOS
GNC literacy at the leadership level - you cannot derive every Kalman variant from scratch, but you can engage substantively with control law structure, estimator behavior, actuator interaction, and their failure modes, and you have done so in your own career
Track record of building simulation and HIL infrastructure that caught real bugs before flight, and post-mortem discipline that changed the pipeline when bugs survived
Experience leading heterogeneous software teams across domains you did not personally come up through
Real opinions on the HW/SW boundary, on-orbit vs ground compute split, and where abstractions earn their keep

Responsibilities

Lead the software engineering organization — FSW, GNC, applied AI, ground — across approximately three to four teams of managers and ICs
Own the integrated software performance of the satellite: deterministic flight software, control law implementation and verification, on-orbit and on-ground AI, and the command-and-control path
Manage the simulation and HIL infrastructure that scales across the program and stays honestly flight-like
Lead the closure of the GNC analytical-to-flight loop so that anomalies trace cleanly to model gaps or implementation bugs without ambiguity
Develop technical leaders in each software domain (including domains outside your strongest) and resist the gravity to over-invest in your home discipline
Defend the boundary between flight software and ground tooling, and the boundary between software and hardware, against drift
Partner with the Director of Hardware, Systems Engineering, and Program Management to make software a peer of hardware in the system