Flight Software Architect

Responsibilities

• Define, develop, and maintain the overall spacecraft flight software architecture, including software components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models.
• Drive architectural decisions, design principles, technical standards, and best practices while providing technical guidance to software engineers.
• Coordinate software interfaces and integration across avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communications, and other spacecraft subsystems.
• Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
• Address fault tolerance, timing, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, safety, performance, and spacecraft reliability in architectural decisions.
• Identify and mitigate architectural risks, evaluate trade-offs, and support design reviews, integration campaigns, verification, and validation activities.
• Align multidisciplinary engineering teams and communicate architectural decisions, constraints, and trade-offs to technical teams and project stakeholders.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience in flight software, embedded software, or safety- and mission-critical systems.
• Proven experience defining and evolving software architectures for complex critical software systems, ideally in spacecraft, launch vehicle, satellite, or aerospace applications.
• Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software, operating systems, hardware-software interfaces, resource-constrained computing, and distributed or fault-tolerant systems.
• Experience translating system-level requirements into software architectures, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
• Understanding of software integration, testing, verification and validation, and configuration and change management in complex engineering environments.
• Experience with architectural trade-off analysis, technical risk management, and engineering decisions under performance, reliability, schedule, and resource constraints.
• Ability to collaborate across engineering disciplines and align stakeholders around clear technical solutions.
• Strong structured thinking, analytical skills, technical communication, ownership, and pragmatic problem-solving abilities.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance is provided for candidates willing to relocate.
• Visa sponsorship is provided where applicable.
• Equal opportunity employer with a stated commitment to diversity.
• Collaborative environment focused on rapidly advancing and democratising space exploration.