Star Catcher Industries, Inc., located in
Jacksonville, Florida, has an opportunity for a
Senior Software Engineer - Embedded & Flight Systems to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities- Lead flight software architecture across programs and co-own cross-domain system interfaces with hardware, FPGA, and systems leads.
- Own full software development lifecycle execution for flight software, including requirements flow-down and decomposition, allocation to design, hardware/software integration, design verification and qualification, transition to production, and fielded product support.
- Set Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategy, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring standards.
- Contribute to software development standards, coding practices, and institutional knowledge as the team grows.
- Mentor embedded/flight software engineers and lead design reviews.
- Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure complete traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
- Maintain software quality through code review and unit and integration testing
Basic Qualifications- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 10+ 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.
- Strong experience with software/hardware co-design, distributed systems design, and software/computer architecture.
- 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, LynxOS, INTEGRITY, Zephyr) or bare-metal environments.
- 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.
- Working knowledge of Bash/Python for build, test, and release automation, along with configuration/change management and debug/trace analysis tools.
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows
- Enjoy 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.
Desired Skills- 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).
- Experience developing software on Embedded Linux platforms is a plus.
- Experience collaborating with FPGA engineers or developing software for heterogeneous FPGA/SoC or system-on-chip architectures.
- Familiarity with safety-critical or mission-assurance software practices (e.g., MISRA C/C++, DO-178C or equivalent assurance frameworks, NASA NPR 7150.2) and common flight architectures such as NASA cFE/cFS.
- Experience with embedded security and encryption for command and telemetry data protection.
- Experience developing or integrating with board support packages (BSPs) and device drivers.
- Experience with Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2) or similar protocols for time synchronization across distributed avionics.
- Experience with continuous integration, automated test infrastructure, and containerized development environments (e.g., Docker), including DevSecOps and test automation using Python or similar languages.
- Familiarity with structured workflow tools supporting requirements management, configuration management, and change control.
- 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. 
