# Senior Software Engineer (Space Communications)

**Company:** [Northwood Space](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/northwood-space)
**Location:** Los Angeles, CA, Washington, DC, California
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $160k – $224k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Rust, Go, C/C++, AWS, Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, REST APIs, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, Postgres, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform
**Posted:** 2025-11-18

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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

## Similar roles

- [Senior Product Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/14eae565-668e-4dd2-8ef5-7f9d17f8b04c) - Aurelian - Seattle, WA - $160k – $220k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/d6bab730-6a28-4888-8caf-a5ed4daa4471) - Cordial - Remote - $160k – $175k/yr
- [Data Services Team](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/54013e5b-1fc0-4fbc-ac3c-f5236866b856) - Sprinter Health - San Francisco, CA - $160k – $200k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer - Business Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/16a262a8-6188-448e-82dd-6af21d9e5e5f) - Huntress - Remote - $160k – $190k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer, Internally Deployed Products](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/dacfa7cf-3945-4388-8a48-840255ed4898) - ClickUp - Remote - $160k – $210k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/cde33086-ba67-4b69-95f5-3e756571fd74
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/cde33086-ba67-4b69-95f5-3e756571fd74