Senior Software Engineer, IR Data Products

Description

The company builds and runs a growing set of infrared (IR) space missions that produce Earth observation data for a wide and expanding customer base.

The FireSat constellation delivers calibrated IR imagery and derived wildfire products to wildfire operators, the scientific community, the US Government and commercial partners.

The Space Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) mission supplies data for weather and cloud characterization, situational awareness and other use cases.

The IR Data Products team owns the shared software that processes, stores and distributes this data, turning raw downlink into calibrated imagery and derived products and delivering them to customers at scale.

In this role you will build, harden and operate the production pipelines and services for the IR missions, focusing on reliable processing, low latency, strong observability and geospatial data serving.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on senior engineer who has shipped and run production geospatial or scientific data pipelines at scale, pairs solid software engineering with real geospatial knowledge, and builds systems that are clear, observable and easy for others to understand.

Initially you will focus on three areas: reliable pipelines, latency reduction, and geospatial data hosting and serving.

You will also work with the Remote Sensing Data Scientists to turn research code into production code, and with the Data Platform and Flight Software teams on shared contracts for capture metadata, navigation products and telemetry interfaces.

This is a hybrid role, with on-site work at the Denver, CO office three days per week.

Responsibilities

• Build and run production pipelines that take IR mission captures through L1 imagery, multispectral stacking, geolocation, orthomosaic tiles, hotspots and derived wildfire products.
• Optimize pipeline infrastructure, services and algorithms to reduce latency.
• Build geospatial data discovery and serving infrastructure and APIs for internal developers and downstream customers.
• Build internal tools for visualizing and inspecting geospatial data.
• Maintain and improve the software testing and release infrastructure and processes.
• Work with Remote Sensing Data Scientists to productionize their code by hardening error paths, adding tests and observability, and making runs repeatable and idempotent.
• Build end-to-end observability for the IR data pipeline, including structured logging, dashboards, metrics and alerts.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years, MS with 6+ years, or PhD with 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
• You have shipped and operated production Python data pipelines and backend services on AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure.
• You have hands-on experience with a workflow orchestrator such as Flyte, Airflow, Prefect, Argo, Dagster or similar, and with containerized deployments.
• You know software engineering fundamentals: production Python, unit and integration testing, Git-based trunk development, code review and CI/CD.
• You have added production-grade observability to a system, including structured logging, metrics, dashboards, alerts and on-call ownership.
• You have hands-on geospatial knowledge, with experience in libraries such as GDAL/OGR, rasterio, PROJ and shapely, and formats such as GeoTIFF, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, NetCDF, Zarr and HDF.
• You can work effectively with a distributed, interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers and program managers.
• Preferred: experience building and running a STAC catalog (stac-fastapi, pystac, pgstac or equivalent) and its ingest and query paths.
• Preferred: experience with xarray, Zarr or NetCDF at scale, including chunked processing and streaming reads from S3.
• Preferred: experience building internal visualization or inspection tools, such as dashboards, map viewers or notebook workflows, for scientific debugging.
• Preferred: experience with Grafana, LogQL, Prometheus or InfluxDB in production.
• Preferred: experience with satellite ground-segment concepts such as downlink, telemetry and capture or swath structure, or with other remote-sensing data pipelines.
• Preferred: experience with Flyte or Union.ai specifically.
• Preferred: Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience for AWS resources.
• Preferred: experience productionizing research or scientific code written by non-engineers.

Conditions

The salary range is $192,000 - $213,000, plus an equity grant and a benefits package. Final pay depends on skills, qualifications, experience and geographic location, as assessed during interviews.

The company was founded in 2021 and is an end-to-end space systems provider that designs, builds and operates LEO satellite constellations for mission-critical data. Its Silicon Valley facility builds spacecraft and integrates payloads.

The company is registered to hire in AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, IA, ID, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, TN, TX, VT, VA and WA.

This role requires access to export-controlled information under US export regulations, so you must be a US person (a US citizen or national, a lawful permanent resident, a refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or an asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158), be eligible to access it without an export authorization, or be eligible and reasonably likely to obtain one. The company may decline to pursue an export license for legitimate business reasons.

Benefits

• Full-time employees receive equity compensation and medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401k plan, short and long term disability insurance and life insurance.
• Employees get three weeks of paid vacation to start, 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time and paid parental leave.