Ground Software Engineer (Sr – Principal)

You'll be a founding-level contributor to Eclipse's ground software platform — the systems that command spacecraft, ingest and distribute telemetry, automate test and integration, and ultimately run constellation operations for our customers. This is a greenfield build with real operational consequences. You'll work directly alongside flight software, RF, and mission ops engineers.

Responsibilities

Satellite Support

• Develop and maintain telemetry processing pipelines to monitor spacecraft health, flag out-of-limit conditions, and surface real-time state data to operators.
• Build and sustain commanding software for uplink generation, sequence management, and command verification across the fleet.
• Support software update workflows for flight and ground systems
  

CI/CD & Test Infrastructure

• Design and maintain hardware-in-the-loop and hardware-out-of-the-loop test frameworks that validate flight software and ground system behavior prior to deployment.
• Develop and integrate simulation environments to support pre-mission rehearsals, regression testing, and anomaly reproduction.
• Build and manage software rollout pipelines for ground systems, ensuring reliable, staged deployment with automated validation gates.
• Champion test coverage and continuous integration practices across the ground software stack.
  

Ground Services

• Develop beam planning software to automate and optimize satellite link scheduling, coverage analysis, and ground station contact windows.
• Build and maintain collision avoidance tooling, including conjunction screening integrations, maneuver planning support, and operator notification workflows.
• Contribute to ground service APIs and data pipelines that support mission operations and downstream data consumers.
  

Operations and Incident Management

• Build alert triage tooling that aggregates telemetry anomalies, correlates events across subsystems, and surfaces root cause hypotheses to operations teams.
• Develop and maintain dashboards and automated monitors for spacecraft health, enabling rapid situational awareness during both nominal and off-nominal operations.
• Create and refine runbook automation tools that guide operators through standardized anomaly response procedures.
• Support post-anomaly analysis workflows, including data retrieval, event reconstruction, and corrective action tracking.
  

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering or a related field
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, real-time data flows, reliability under constraints – with expertise in a systems programming language such as C/C++/Rust/Go, proficiency in scripting languages and data visualization
• Good grasp of software product security fundamentals
• Hands-on experience building real-time telemetry and commanding pipelines — low-latency messaging, time-series stores, relational databases
• Experience with CI/CD, dependency management, and infrastructure-as-code
• End-to-end observability: logging, metrics, distributed tracing
• Docker/Kubernetes and operational readiness across cloud, on-prem and controlled-network environments
  

Nice to Have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years on spacecraft ground systems, mission operations software, or equivalent safety-critical distributed systems
• Experience with CCSDS telemetry/commanding standards or equivalent ground system protocols
• Full-stack development experience – backend services, RESTful or event-driven APIs, and frontend interfaces (Typescript / React or equivalent) sufficient to build and own operator-facing tooling
• Prior work on mission control systems, AOCS/GNC support tools, or flight software integration benches
• Familiarity with RF ground station interfaces, modem commanding, or link scheduling
• Experience with ISL-connected constellation operations or multi-node ground network architectures
• Track record shipping software that touched a real spacecraft
• Architected a ground system or mission platform from scratch, not just contributed to one
• Defined technical interfaces across hardware, flight software, and ground teams

Salary: $145k - $225k