Senior Software Engineer (Space Communications)
Designs, implements, and optimizes global distributed systems for space communications, including control planes, APIs, edge hardware control, high-bandwidth networking, monitoring, and simulations. Requires 5+ years experience in software development with focus on cloud, embedded, and networking technologies.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end architecture of a global, distributed control plane that schedules hundreds of satellite passes per hour across mixed AWS/on-prem nodes
- Mentor teams on fault-tolerant patterns and land design RFCs that become Northwood standards
- Build and own customer-facing and internal control-plane APIs – craft, version, and operate the endpoints that let users search, reserve, update, and cancel satellite passes at multi-thousand-request scale
- Design and implement the underlying workflow-orchestrator that coordinates satellite communications across sites, reconciles conflicts, and enables autonomous coordination across the worlds largest ground network
- Architect the real-time TT&C / data-transfer interfaces – deliver a secure, bidirectional streaming channel that carries command uplink, telemetry downlink, and supports near-real-time data delivery across Northwood’s global ground network
- Design and implement control systems for our ground station hardware, interacting with embedded systems to RF modems
- Architect and optimize data pipelines for efficient movement of data between ground stations and various end environments
- Architect a Tbps-class SD-WAN overlay (WireGuard + QUIC) that transparently shifts traffic between sites, S3-compatible buckets and customer VPCs, with per-flow QoS and FEC
- Create comprehensive monitoring and alerting solutions for software and infrastructure
- Implement tools to ensure continuous uptime and rapid issue resolution
- Transform our telemetry data into actionable insights, enabling predictive diagnostics
- Develop software for production line bring-up and testing
- Automate testing procedures to ensure hardware and software reliability
- Create simulations that model satellite and network design
- Design and implement software that orchestrates our global antenna network and data plane
Basic Qualifications
- 5-7+ years of professional software development experience
- Completed bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Math or other related major (soft-requirement)
Preferred Qualifications
- Proficiency in Rust, Golang, C/C++
- Experience designing and implementing distributed systems
- Knowledge of cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and orchestration tools
- Familiarity with microservices architecture and serverless computing
- Experience with hardware control systems, FPGA programming and orchestration, embedded systems (FreeRTOS, Zephyr)
- Proficiency in architecting data pipelines for high-throughput environments
- Understanding of network programming and IP protocols, high-speed communications (10GigE+)
- Experience in building RESTful APIs
- Proficiency with front-end technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, frameworks: Angular, React
- Experience with monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack)
- Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Ansible)
- Experience managing CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD)
- Experience with time-series databases (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB), relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- Experience designing/implementing simulations for physical models or network movement
- Experience designing/implementing orchestration engines for distributed nodes
- Experience with automated testing frameworks
Skills
Rust, Go, C/C++, AWS, Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, REST APIs, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, Postgres, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform
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