Backend Software Engineer - Mission Planning Strategy

Wanna join the adventure?

Loft Orbital is looking for a Backend Software Engineer to join the Mission Platform organization.

You'll work on a small and driven team, developing a brand new software product that optimizes tasking across a large heterogeneous constellation of multi-sensor satellites:

• scale to fly 50+ satellites, serving 100,000s of customer tasking orders

• design, build and optimize a brand new product from scratch

• solve challenging problems across multiple domains:

  • Astrodynamics, satellite capacity modeling and simulation

  • Back-end/API performance

  • Low latency, high responsiveness system design

  • Mathematical optimization and scheduling problems

We're looking for someone with a solid background in software engineering, ideally with a proven track record of building systems from scratch and solving complex, system-level problems. The ideal candidate can operate independently in a fast-paced environment and challenge requirements.

About this role:

• Develop and improve a new software product that manages customer orders across a multi-sensor constellation of satellites
• Interface with teams to help design the customer-facing interfaces and the back-end pipeline that goes from a plan to onboardexecution
• Build tools and services that help sales and operators understand current and future capacity, operational risks and opportunities for growth
• Solve complex multi-objective optimization problems that maximize collection capacity, balancing various (conflicting) customer constraints, and help define what “optimal” means
• Design systems of systems: decompose complex problems into well-bounded services with clear interfaces, and reason about how they interact, fail, and scale together

Must Haves:

• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
• 2+ years of experience with designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
• Proven track record of operating independently and solving complex problems
• Experience with system design
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, for technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to Haves:

• Master’s degree in Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
• 5+ years of experience designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
• Proficiency with Django/GraphQL stacks
• Hands-on experience operating spacecraft
• Experience with C++ / high-performance Python (vectorization, JIT compilation like Numba, GPU parallelization)
• Demonstrated practical experience building high-performance backend software applications and/or libraries
• Specialization in one of the following disciplines:
  • Integer/linear/multi-objective optimization or other Operations Research style problems
  • Back-end/API performance optimization
  • Distributed systems
  • Security
  • Earth observation tasking
  • High-performance computing

Some of Our Awesome Benefits:

• Equity, we want you to have an active role in our success
• Up to 35 days of Paid Time Off (vacations & RTT ) and flexible working hours, we want you to be at your best
• Health and life insurance, we care about your health
• Lunch Vouchers, because let’s be honest, we love food! (we even have a slack channel about it #loft-gourmand)
• Cross-office travel opportunities between San Francisco, Colorado, and Toulouse to learn from our differences
• Company and team off-sites and many other events to work & celebrate together
• Relocation assistance to Toulouse when applicable