Flight Software Development Lead

Vantage Systems•Washington, DC

1d•$196,518 - $234,894

About The Position

This role involves leading satellite software development efforts, from requirements definition through flight qualification testing. The lead will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and enhancing complex software systems, providing input on system design including hardware/software trade-offs, software reuse, and COTS/GOTS utilization. The position requires designing, implementing, and integrating software applications, utilizing appropriate software engineering methodologies, and ensuring efficient delivery through industry standards and repeatable processes. Key responsibilities include mitigating risks, controlling costs and schedule, and managing large-scale integrated software projects. The role also involves reviewing and testing software components, performing comprehensive testing of hardware and software, and developing under real-time constraints. Experience with interprocess communications, distributed systems, standard communication ports, hardware/application specific boot code, and processor/memory configuration assessment is essential. The lead will provide engineering support to the flight and ground system design team, focusing on system integrity, applying standards, exploiting new technologies, and promoting software reuse. Specific development areas include spacecraft bus functions, instrument control, onboard data processing, external commanding and control, status/telemetry delivery, safety-critical applications, flight system control, and applying advanced mathematical methods and algorithms.

Requirements

Experience with satellite integration, test and operations.
Experience leading satellite software development efforts from requirements through flight qualification testing.
20 years' experience
BS Degree
TS/SCI Security Clearance

Responsibilities

Develop, maintain, and enhance complex and diverse software systems based upon documented requirements.
Provide specific input to the software components of a system design to include hardware/software trade-offs, software reuse, use of COTS/GOTS in place of new development, and requirements analysis and synthesis from system level to individual software components.
Design, implement, and integrate software applications or performs software engineering tasks.
Utilize software engineering and design methodologies appropriate to the development, integration, and production environment.
Ensure efficient delivery of software engineering capabilities using industry standards and repeatable processes.
Mitigate risks, control costs and schedule variance, and effectively manage large scale, integrated software projects.
Review and test software components for adherence to the design requirements and document test results.
Perform comprehensive testing on computer hardware and software components to evaluate operational and performance compliance of the overall systems.
Develop under the real-time constrains of deadlines, task schedules, rates, task priorities, watchdog timers, interrupts, latency and jitter of soft and hard real-time operating systems.
Manage and mitigate interprocess communications leveraging message queues, mutex, semaphores, blocking and non-blocking operations in multi-threaded software implementations.
Design and develop distributed software systems leveraging multiple software, hardware, and communication technologies.
Utilize standard communications ports and interfaces to facilitate communication between processes, processors, computers, and peripheral systems.
Develop hardware and application specific boot code for establishing baseline services and loading OS and application code into execution memory.
Assess and make recommendations on processor, memory and single board computer configurations which meet the compatibility, performance, memory and interface requirements of the system.
Provide engineering support of the flight and ground system design and development team to assure system integrity, standards are applied where practical, new and emerging technologies are exploited to the required extent, and the system is developed with the goal of reuse of applicable software components in both ground and space systems to reduce development time and cost.
Design and development of all software related to spacecraft bus functions, instrument control, and onboard data processing.
Develop software for both run-time external commanding, controlling, and configuring; as well as run-time delivery of status, event logs, state of health and telemetry.
Develop safety-critical applications capable of detecting software and hardware fault and responding to faults in a prescribed manner through isolation or recovery.
Develop software control of flight systems leveraging real-time sensing and actuating interfaces.
Evaluate and apply advanced mathematical methods and algorithms in software solutions which meet the control and performance requirements of flight systems.