Senior Embedded & Flight Software Engineer

Star Catcher•Jacksonville, FL

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Star Catcher Industries, Inc. (Star Catcher), located in Jacksonville, FL, has an opportunity for a Senior Embedded & Flight Software Engineer to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid. This role will help build the software that runs our missions, from onboard flight and payload software to the ground systems that support development, integration, and mission operations.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
7+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems, with a proven track record of delivering complex projects from architecture through deployment.
Expert proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, with a solid understanding of memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling.
Experience developing software on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using Real-Time Operating Systems (e.g., RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments.
Strong understanding of standard embedded communication protocols and serial interfaces.
Familiarity with backplane-based embedded architectures (e.g., SpaceVPX, VPX, CompactPCI Serial) and integrating compute modules within a multi-board chassis system.
Comfortable with hardware-software integration, using tools such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and protocol analyzers to diagnose complex interactions.
Experience using Git and collaborative software development workflows.
Enjoys operating in a fast-paced, early-stage environment and solving ambiguous engineering challenges with an analytical approach.
Willing to own systems from initial concept through flight operations.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing software that has flown in space, or familiarity with radiation-mitigation strategies in software (e.g., memory scrubbing, checkpointing, ECC memory, redundancy schemes, watchdog timers).
Experience developing software on Embedded Linux platforms is a plus.
Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC or system-on-chip architectures.
Familiarity with safety-critical, mission-assurance software development standards, or common flight architectures (e.g., NASA cFE/cFS, MISRA C/C++, DO-178C, or NASA NPR 7150.2).
Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments (e.g., Docker).
Familiarity with ground support equipment, mission operations tooling, or telemetry/command software.
Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and validate real-time embedded software for spacecraft payload and subsystem control.
Develop firmware, device drivers, and middleware running on bare-metal and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), with an emphasis on determinism and maintainability.
Develop software supporting spacecraft bus management, including command and telemetry processing, subsystem coordination, and onboard autonomy.
Implement robust interfaces using communication protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, RS-422, and, where applicable, SpaceWire and CCSDS standards.
Collaborate closely with electrical and hardware teams to support board bring-up, bootloader development, backplane and compute-module integration (e.g., SpaceVPX/VPX), and peripheral integration.
Implement robust Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategies, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring.
Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure complete traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
Design and maintain software tools supporting hardware bring-up, automated testing, mission operations, and telemetry visualization.
Develop automation tools using Python, C++, or similar languages to improve engineering productivity and test repeatability.
Develop automated unit, integration, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test suites.
Perform fault-injection testing and simulation to verify software robustness under off-nominal conditions, and participate in environmental test campaigns (e.g., thermal-vacuum, vibration, EMI/EMC).
Design scalable, maintainable software architectures.
Utilize modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD pipelines, static analysis tools, automated builds, and structured code reviews to ensure mission assurance throughout the spacecraft lifecycle.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers while helping establish software development standards, engineering processes, and institutional knowledge across the company.