Telemetry Systems Engineer - (NTSE102826.1)

Cimarron•Houston, TX

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Cimarron is seeking a Telemetry Systems Engineer to serve as the technical authority for systems that publish mission telemetry to NASA teams and the public, and to lead the evolution of NASA’s MQTT telemetry bridge from prototype to production-ready capability. The role defines the architecture, security model, and implementation strategy for expanding telemetry distribution beyond public data. It works with engineering, cybersecurity, platform, and mission operations teams to develop and deploy scalable, secure, and resilient solutions. The engineer leads architecture reviews, guides technical design decisions, and develops strategic roadmaps for telemetry infrastructure modernization. The work involves distributed systems, event-driven architectures, real-time data distribution platforms, and enterprise messaging solutions supporting current and future mission operations. The role also provides technical leadership and mentorship, evaluates emerging technologies, and ensures transitioned capabilities are documented, operationally supportable, and ready for long-term sustainment. The work supports software, data, and infrastructure technologies used by NASA flight controllers, engineers, and mission support personnel to monitor, analyze, and operate human spaceflight missions and future exploration systems. This is a hybrid position based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship, due to facility security requirements.
Ability to complete a pre-employment background check and drug screening, including testing for marijuana use.
At least 3 years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building or sustaining real-time telemetry or networked distributed systems in production.
Hands-on experience with message-oriented middleware such as Apache Kafka, Mosquitto, EMQX, or HiveMQ.
Experience sustaining production services, including incident response, change control, and mentoring other engineers.
Experience with authentication and authorization technologies or approaches such as OAuth2/OIDC, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, and TLS/PKI.
Experience with containers and serverless deployments.
Ability to architect a multi-phase approach, lead it through approvals, and brief NASA stakeholders.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Experience with spaceflight or other real-time telemetry and with pub/sub messaging servers.
Familiarity with CCSDS standards, delay/disruption-tolerant networking, or asynchronous message services.
Experience with containers on Kubernetes or OpenShift.
Security certifications such as Security+ or CISSP, or experience with NIST 800-53/NIST 800-171.
Identity provider experience, for example Keycloak.
Experience in performance testing and tuning of real-time systems.
Prior NASA or federal contracting experience.

Responsibilities

Serve as the senior technical resource for the mission control data portal publishing internal telemetry and the public ISS telemetry server; guide incident investigation, troubleshooting, and changes with the sustaining team.
Lead phased implementation of the MQTT telemetry bridge for production-quality use, beginning with publishing existing public telemetry over MQTT without interrupting external consumers.
Move the bridge toward newer mission data sources and streaming interfaces, publish a larger set of telemetry symbols, and support requests for historical data while respecting mission-control security.
Design and build a phased security model to expand the bridge beyond public data, including authentication, topic-level authorization, encryption, auditing, and data-classification controls.
Work with NASA cybersecurity, export-control, and public-affairs stakeholders to obtain approvals for each class of data.
Evaluate alternative architectures and tools, prototype with other NASA organizations, and recommend options that reduce lifecycle cost and improve efficiency.
Document designs and interfaces, and deliver software and documentation in accordance with NASA/JSC software management standards.
Lead architecture reviews, guide technical design decisions, and develop strategic roadmaps for telemetry infrastructure modernization.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, evaluate emerging technologies, and ensure transitioned capabilities are documented, operationally supportable, and ready for long-term sustainment.