Senior Software Engineer, Mission Optimization

Description

The company designs, builds and runs the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites ever flown, and sells the data it collects through a cloud platform to commercial, environmental and humanitarian customers.

The company controls hardware, manufacturing, data processing and software itself, so the office brings together specialists from many fields.

Customers use the data to build new technologies, grow revenue, support research and tackle large global problems.

The company is distributed, with staff working remotely worldwide and offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and The Netherlands.

The Mission Optimization team improves the throughput and efficiency of the largest Earth observation constellation. It finds and removes the bottlenecks that limit what the fleets deliver, covering contact scheduling, downlink latency, collection capacity and concepts of operation for future missions.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you would own optimization projects from start to finish: defining a vague operational problem with data, designing the fix and getting it running in production. You would work with spacecraft and systems engineers to learn what current and future fleets can do, with the software and operations teams that run the systems you change, and with Product to keep work aligned with customer commitments and SLA risk. Gaining agreement across those groups is as central to the role as writing code.

Responsibilities

• Own major optimization projects end to end: define the problem, analyse data, design the solution, implement it and measure results against fleet SLAs and KPIs.
• Design, build and maintain critical software that schedules and optimizes activities across the satellite constellations.
• Define concepts of operation for current fleets and for new missions and customer use cases, working directly with spacecraft, imaging and systems engineering teams.
• Analyse operational data across the whole stack to find inefficiencies others have missed, and build the case for fixing them.
• Advise the team on technical matters and mentor earlier-career engineers.
• Present the team's technical position to stakeholders in engineering, operations and product.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth gained through your work.
• A bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science or a related technical field.
• Strong Python skills or a comparable language, and a record of designing and shipping systems that others rely on.
• Ability to turn an ambiguous, loosely scoped problem into a measurable result with little direction.
• A data-driven approach, including statistical analysis and reasoning over large operational datasets.
• Clear written and verbal communication with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers.
• Nice to have: familiarity with satellite engineering, orbital mechanics or the space environment and its operational limits.
• Nice to have: hands-on experience operating spacecraft or other remote or autonomous systems.
• Nice to have: experience defining concepts of operations for complex systems.
• Nice to have: background in optimization, scheduling or operations research, such as constraint solvers, heuristics or combinatorial optimization.
• Nice to have: experience with DevOps tools and practices, such as Git, GitLab, Docker, CI/CD, Linux, Sentry and Datadog.
• Nice to have: contributions to open-source software.
• This role requires access to export-controlled information. Employment or contracting depends on your ability to access that information without an additional export licence from the Bureau of Industry and Security or the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.

Conditions

Full-time, hybrid role requiring work from the San Francisco office 3 days per week.

US base salary range for the San Francisco location: $162,600 - $203,200 USD. The final figure depends on job-related experience, skills and location, and the range reflects typical new-hire pay in US locations only. A recruiter can share the range for your preferred location.

The role may be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives, including bonus and equity.

The company will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

The company seeks people who reflect the wider world and who may bring value beyond the listed qualifications, so applicants who do not meet every point are encouraged to apply.

Benefits

• Benefits vary by employment type and location, according to applicable law or company policy.
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution.
• Generous paid time off, plus holidays and company-wide days off.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Wellness program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
• Home office reimbursement.
• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement.
• Tuition reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning.
• Equity.
• Commuter benefits for those local to an office.
• Paid volunteering time off.