Senior Software Engineer (Space Communications)

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