Flight Software Architect

Job Description

Flight Software Architect | Confidential Employer

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at The Exploration Company. We are building spacecrafts for humanity, and the Flight Software Architect plays a key role in defining and maintaining the software architecture for our spacecraft flight software. This position ensures the architecture meets mission needs, system-level requirements, and safety and reliability objectives, while remaining scalable, maintainable, and adaptable for evolving spacecraft platforms.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Full-time
• Mission: Drives architectural decisions, technical consistency, and the integration of software across the spacecraft.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Architecture Definition: Define, develop, and maintain the overall flight software architecture, including components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models, ensuring alignment with spacecraft system architecture and mission objectives.
• Technical Leadership: Drive key architectural decisions, establish design principles, technical standards, and best practices for flight software development, providing technical guidance to engineers.
• System Integration: Define and coordinate software interfaces with avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communication systems, and other spacecraft subsystems, ensuring robust integration.
• Requirements Translation: Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, and interface specifications, ensuring traceability.
• Reliability & Safety: Ensure architectural decisions address fault tolerance, robustness, timing constraints, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, and overall spacecraft reliability.

The Must-Haves
• Background: 10–15 years of professional experience in software engineering, with 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.
• Experience: Professional experience ideally for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or other aerospace applications, including translating system-level requirements into software architectures, interface specifications, and verification strategies.
• Skills: Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software, operating systems, hardware–software interfaces, resource-constrained computing, and distributed or fault-tolerant systems; solid understanding of software integration, testing, verification and validation, and configuration and change management; experience with architectural trade-off analysis and technical risk management; ability to work effectively across multiple engineering disciplines and align stakeholders; excellent technical communication skills.
• Bonus: A strong ownership mindset, a pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and a passion for developing reliable software that enables humanity’s exploration of space.