Star Catcher Industries, Inc., located in
Jacksonville, Florida, has an opportunity for a
Senior Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities- Lead ground segment software architecture and co-own flight/ground interfaces, including telemetry visualization, command planning, and data processing pipelines for mission operations.
- Lead full software development lifecycle execution for ground and mission systems, including requirements flow-down, design, hardware/software integration and test, verification, transition to production, and fielded product support.
- Architect real-time and near-real-time telemetry ingestion, processing, and storage pipelines, including frame/packet decommutation, time-series storage, and limit-checking/alerting for spacecraft health and status.
- Define command planning, sequencing, and validation workflows, ensuring safe command uplink and interfacing with ground station scheduling and pass-planning systems.
- Define interfaces between ground tooling and spacecraft systems alongside embedded/flight software and electrical engineering teams, including telemetry/command dictionaries and interface control documents.
- Set standards for ground software architecture, APIs, service-oriented design, and CI/CD practices, including containerization and deployment strategy.
- Establish observability practices (logging, metrics, alerting) for ground and mission systems to support on-call operations.
- Mentor ground/mission systems engineers and lead design reviews.
- Support internal software architecture and code quality practices across ground and non-embedded systems.
Basic Qualifications- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 10+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, or engineering tooling), with demonstrated experience owning system architecture.
- Proficiency in one or more of Python, C++, Go, or similar languages.
- Experience with databases (relational and time-series), REST/gRPC APIs, and service-oriented/microservices architecture.
- Experience with distributed systems design, software/computer architecture, and structured workflow tools supporting requirements management, configuration management, and change control.
Technical Expertise- Experience with telemetry and command processing standards (e.g., CCSDS, XTCE, or similar) and real-time data streaming (e.g., message queues or pub/sub systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ).
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code for deployment of ground software.
- Experience with observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for monitoring mission-critical ground systems.
- Familiarity with mission operations concepts, including pass scheduling, command sequencing, and anomaly/limit monitoring.
- Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, or GovCloud equivalents) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows
Desired Skills- Experience with mission operations, ground segment, or telemetry/command systems for spacecraft or other real-time platforms.
- Experience integrating software with hardware test benches or lab equipment.
- Experience with network storage systems, Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand.
- Working knowledge of authentication and access-control schemes (e.g., RADIUS, LDAP).
- Experience with embedded security and encryption for data and command protection.
- DevSecOps and test automation experience using Python or similar languages.
- Familiarity with Linux development environments and tooling.
- Experience in a fast-paced startup or early-stage engineering environment.
- Experience mentoring engineers or establishing team-wide software standards.
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. 
