Senior Flight Software Engineer, Arc Vehicle

Position Overview: 

As a Senior Flight Software Engineer at Inversion you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and verifying the core flight software that controls the Arc hypersonic reentry vehicle. You will own safety-critical software modules end-to-end, including vehicle state machines, flight autonomy, and fault-management logic. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop, test, and deploy high-reliability, real-time flight software. 
• Design and implement safety-critical state machines, autonomous flight sequencing, and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) algorithms. 
• Integrate and optimize GNC flight software modules from the Reentry and Accurate Landing teams into the main C++ software loop. 
• Perform low-level driver development and board bring-up on flight hardware, debugging hardware-software interfaces using logic analyzers and oscilloscopes. 
• Lead the development and execution of Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test suites to validate software performance and timing margins. 
• Participate in rigorous code reviews, establish technical coding standards, and mentor junior embedded software developers. 
• Collaborate with systems and avionics engineers to define interface control documents (ICDs), telemetry packets, and communication protocols (CAN, Ethernet, Serial). 

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent technical experience. 
• Typically 5+ years of professional experience developing embedded, real-time, or safety-critical software. 
• Strong proficiency systems programming languages (C / C++ / Rust) in a Linux-based development environment. 
• Solid understanding of embedded Linux, deterministic software design, memory management, and multi-threaded architectures. 
• Hands-on experience writing software that directly interfaces with physical hardware via communication protocols (such as CAN, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, or RS-422). 
• Demonstrated excellent verbal and written communication skills with experience presenting technical software designs. 
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government Secret/Top Secret security clearance. 

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience developing flight software for spacecraft, launch vehicles, or safety-critical autonomous aerospace platforms. 
• Familiarity with modern software development best practices, including Git, unit-testing frameworks, static analysis, and automated CI/CD pipelines. 
• Familiarity with physical systems modeling, sensor data processing, or GNC algorithms. 
• Prior experience in a fast-paced aerospace startup or small, high-ownership team. 

Our office headquarters is located in Playa Vista, CA. This position requires in office presence.

_{The California annual base salary for this role is currently $139,000 - $201,000.  Pay Grades are determined by role, level, location, and alignment with market data.  Individual pay will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: interviews and an assessment of several factors that are unique to each candidate, job-related skills, relevant education and experience, certifications, abilities of the candidate and internal equity.}