Lead Flight Software Engineer (Founding Engineer)

Boulder, CO

Our client are a new exciting Space startup looking for a Flight Software Lead to take ownership of thier flight software stack from the ground up, enabling autonomous drone flight, proximity ops, formation flying, and docking.

This will be a Founding-level role: You will be a core technical leader in the business, with meaningful equity and involvement in technical decisions, customer engagement, and building the team.

From a technical perspective this is not a role where you’ll inherit or maintain a flight software stack, you’ll architect it, and everything their drones do in orbit will run on it.

What You’ll Own:

• Build the flight software platform and team that will fly thousands of autonomous space drones across commercial inspection and defense programs


• Architect the FSW stack end-to-end including framework, command and telemetry, boot and mode sequencing, and device drivers


• Select flight computers and design the drone compute and avionics architecture


• Design, develop, and validate drone flight, ground, and sim software


• Deliver flight-proven software by owning the on-orbit heritage payload


• The avionics and autonomy stack that flies as a hosted payload and returns real orbital data before their first vehicle


• Help build a comprehensive but lean EDU, including an expansive “air-floor” for rapid flight iteration and validation


• Build the CI/CD, hardware-in-the-loop test benches, and sim environments that allows them to rapidly iterate and validate


• Qualify COTS avionics in-house


• Lead software readiness and own the go/no-go for FSW deployment


• Recruit and mentor the leading autonomous flight software team for precision inspection, RPOD, and formation flying


• Help build the company as a technical co-founder, supporting across all decisions, customer engagements, hiring, and program reviews

Experience Required:

• Significant experience owning or leading flight software for spacecraft


• Deep embedded background


• Hands-on experience with FDIR and/or safety-critical systems


• Comfortable and excited about building architectures and systems from the ground up

If you’ve owned flight software, know what it takes to make an autonomous vehicle safe-able in orbit, and want the responsibility that comes with being an early technical leader building something new in space, we’d love to hear from you.