Senior Software Engineer - Embedded & Flight Systems I

Star Catcher•Jacksonville, FL

About The Position

Star Catcher Industries, Inc., located in Jacksonville, Florida, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support development of spacecraft for space-to-space power beaming and the Star Catcher Network, an orbital power grid. The role leads flight software architecture across programs and co-owns cross-domain interfaces with hardware, FPGA, and systems leads. It owns flight software development through requirements decomposition, design allocation, hardware/software integration, verification and qualification, production transition, and fielded product support. The engineer establishes fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR), watchdog, redundancy-management, and health-monitoring approaches; contributes to software standards and coding practices; mentors engineers; and participates in design reviews and software verification and validation.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
At least 10 years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems, with a track record of delivering complex projects from architecture through deployment.
Expert proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, including memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling.
Strong experience with software/hardware co-design, distributed systems design, and software/computer architecture.
Experience developing on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using real-time operating systems such as RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, LynxOS, INTEGRITY, or Zephyr, or bare-metal environments.
Familiarity with backplane-based embedded architectures such as SpaceVPX, VPX, or CompactPCI Serial, and integrating compute modules within multi-board chassis systems.
Ability to perform hardware/software integration using tools such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and protocol analyzers.
Working knowledge of Bash and Python for build, test, and release automation, as well as configuration/change management and debug/trace analysis tools.
Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows.
Enjoys working in a fast-paced, early-stage environment and solving ambiguous engineering challenges analytically.
Willingness to own systems from initial concept through flight operations.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing software that has flown in space, or familiarity with software radiation-mitigation strategies such as memory scrubbing, checkpointing, ECC memory, redundancy schemes, and watchdog timers.
Experience developing software on Embedded Linux platforms.
Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC or system-on-chip architectures.
Familiarity with safety-critical or mission-assurance software practices, such as MISRA C/C++, DO-178C or equivalent assurance frameworks, NASA NPR 7150.2, and flight architectures such as NASA cFE/cFS.
Experience with embedded security and encryption for command and telemetry data protection.
Experience developing or integrating board support packages (BSPs) and device drivers.
Experience with Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2) or similar protocols for time synchronization across distributed avionics.
Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments such as Docker, including DevSecOps and test automation using Python or similar languages.
Familiarity with structured workflow tools supporting requirements management, configuration management, and change control.
Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.

Responsibilities

Lead flight software architecture across programs and co-own cross-domain system interfaces with hardware, FPGA, and systems leads.
Own the flight software development lifecycle, including requirements flow-down and decomposition, allocation to design, hardware/software integration, design verification and qualification, transition to production, and fielded product support.
Set Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategy, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring standards.
Contribute to software development standards, coding practices, and institutional knowledge as the team grows.
Mentor embedded and flight software engineers and lead design reviews.
Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
Maintain software quality through code review and unit and integration testing.