Senior Ground Software Engineer

Astro Mechanica • San Francisco, CA

10d • $175,000 - $250,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Astro Mechanica is seeking a Senior Ground Software Engineer (Telemetry & Control) to architect and build the end-to-end system that ingests, processes, stores, and visualizes aircraft flight telemetry in Mission Control, monitors aircraft health, and sends commands to the aircraft. The system handles modest-volume but complex, time-critical data, with a target of delivering telemetry to an operator’s screen within roughly one second of it leaving the aircraft. The role works across the aircraft radio link, ground data pipeline, backend services, APIs, and Mission Control visualization, in close collaboration with flight software and other engineering disciplines. This is a fast-paced role in a dynamic startup environment with a direct impact on the company’s mission. The position is expected to be performed in the office five days a week.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or a Science discipline.
• At least 5 years of professional software development experience.
• Experience building real-time data or telemetry ingestion and processing systems.
• Experience implementing a cloud stack that ingests data, stores it in a database, and processes it to serve an application.
• Hands-on experience with time-series databases and a strong understanding of trade-offs between database technologies and data-ingestion approaches.
• Experience designing low-latency, high-reliability systems, including fault tolerance for network and service failures.
• Proficiency in languages, frameworks, and API design used to expose database data to applications.
• Breadth across the software stack, with the greatest depth on the backend and cloud side.

Nice To Haves

• Front-end experience building web applications that query a server and render live data.
• Experience with telemetry from physical systems such as aircraft, launch vehicles, satellites, autonomous vehicles, or connected-vehicle fleets; radio links; or mission-control and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the end-to-end ground data pipeline, from telemetry ingestion over the radio link through real-time processing, storage, backend APIs and business logic, to Mission Control visualization.
• Drive low latency across the entire system, targeting roughly one second from aircraft to operator display.
• Design for fault tolerance so network-path failures, crashed services, or cloud-region outages do not put the aircraft at risk.
• Select and operate appropriate database technologies, including time-series databases, for flight telemetry.
• Build tools operators use to monitor aircraft health and command the plane.
• Keep the pipeline clean and simple enough for the team to understand end to end.
• Work with flight software and other engineering disciplines to define interfaces between the aircraft and the ground.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, including Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA).
• 401(k) program and transparent stock option plan.
• Self-managed, flexible time-off policy, including PTO, paid holidays, and sick time.
• Flexible work environment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior