Star Catcher Industries, Inc. (Star Catcher), located in Jacksonville, FL, has an opportunity for a Senior Embedded & Flight Software Engineer to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid. This role will help build the software that runs our missions, from onboard flight and payload software to the ground systems that support development, integration, and mission operations.
Key Responsibilities
- Flight & Embedded Software: Design, implement, and validate real-time embedded software for spacecraft payload and subsystem control. Develop firmware, device drivers, and middleware running on bare-metal and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), with an emphasis on determinism and maintainability.
- Bus & Systems Management: Develop software supporting spacecraft bus management, including command and telemetry processing, subsystem coordination, and onboard autonomy. Implement robust interfaces using communication protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, RS-422, and, where applicable, SpaceWire and CCSDS standards.
- Hardware Integration & FDIR: Collaborate closely with electrical and hardware teams to support board bring-up, bootloader development, backplane and compute-module integration (e.g., SpaceVPX/VPX), and peripheral integration. Implement robust Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategies, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring.
- Requirements & Verification: Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure complete traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
- Ground Support & Automation: Design and maintain software tools supporting hardware bring-up, automated testing, mission operations, and telemetry visualization. Develop automation tools using Python, C++, or similar languages to improve engineering productivity and test repeatability.
- Testing & Verification: Develop automated unit, integration, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test suites. Perform fault-injection testing and simulation to verify software robustness under off-nominal conditions, and participate in environmental test campaigns (e.g., thermal-vacuum, vibration, EMI/EMC).
- Architecture & Code Quality: Design scalable, maintainable software architectures. Utilize modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD pipelines, static analysis tools, automated builds, and structured code reviews to ensure mission assurance throughout the spacecraft lifecycle.
- Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers while helping establish software development standards, engineering processes, and institutional knowledge across the company.
Basic Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 7+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware-centric, real-time systems, with a proven track record of delivering complex projects from architecture through deployment.
- Technical Expertise:
- Expert proficiency in C and C++ for embedded systems, with a solid understanding of memory management, concurrency, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling.
- Experience developing software on ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, or similar embedded processor architectures using Real-Time Operating Systems (e.g., RTEMS, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments.
- Strong understanding of standard embedded communication protocols and serial interfaces.
- Familiarity with backplane-based embedded architectures (e.g., SpaceVPX, VPX, CompactPCI Serial) and integrating compute modules within a multi-board chassis system.
- Comfortable with hardware-software integration, using tools such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and protocol analyzers to diagnose complex interactions.
- Experience using Git and collaborative software development workflows.
- Mindset: Enjoys operating in a fast-paced, early-stage environment and solving ambiguous engineering challenges with an analytical approach. Willing to own systems from initial concept through flight operations.
Preferred Qualifications
- Space Flight Software: Experience developing software that has flown in space, or familiarity with radiation-mitigation strategies in software (e.g., memory scrubbing, checkpointing, ECC memory, redundancy schemes, watchdog timers).
- Embedded Linux: Experience developing software on Embedded Linux platforms is a plus.
- FPGA/SoC Interfacing: Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC or system-on-chip architectures.
- High-Rel Coding Standards & Frameworks: Familiarity with safety-critical, mission-assurance software development standards, or common flight architectures (e.g., NASA cFE/cFS, MISRA C/C++, DO-178C, or NASA NPR 7150.2).
- Modern DevOps & Tooling: Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments (e.g., Docker).
- Ground Systems Experience: Familiarity with ground support equipment, mission operations tooling, or telemetry/command software.
- Advanced Degrees: Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
Help us deploy and scale space infrastructure that will drive our utilization of space forward! We offer a highly competitive benefits package including access to comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement plan, life insurance, and paid parental leave, in addition to other benefits.
Star Catcher is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Star Catcher is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.
All offers of employment at Star Catcher are contingent upon results of a thorough background check and your ability to provide proof of eligibility to work in the US.
To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.