Onboard Software Engineer - Hyperdrive

Wanna join the adventure?

Loft’s Onboard Software group provides the on-orbit software that powers our core products. This is responsible for monitoring and control of major space program elements, including:

• Flight Products computational environments (including physical and virtual processors);

• Interfaces with external equipment (imagers, RF, ISL); and

• Interfaces with the spacecraft bus.

Hyperdrive is the common platform powering every onboard service across our spacecraft.

The team builds the core capabilities other onboard services need to run mission logic-from interactions and housekeeping to events, automated fault detection and recovery, and lifecycle management.

By making complex spacecraft software consistent, observable, and resilient, Hyperdrive helps teams move faster while keeping missions safe in orbit.

About this role:

• Design, implement, and refine software with a high degree of ownership, driving impactful features from concept through delivery while ensuring robustness and reliability.
• Review code, provide clear feedback, and enforce adherence to established development processes, style guides, and design standards to maintain consistency and quality across the codebase.
• Design and implement unit tests for both self-authored and peer-authored code.
• Utilize version control systems to create feature branches, push code, and merge approved code into production branches.
• Contribute to the onboard software architecture through design proposals and collaborative review
• Participate in the review and enhancement of software development processes and design standards.
• Coordinate with downstream teams on the release, distribution and adoption of latest releases.
• In addition to responsibilities within onboard software, you’ll have the opportunity to directly be involved in operating our on-orbit fleet of satellites.

Must Haves:

• 5+ years' software engineering experience, using programming languages including C/C++ (C++11 or newer) and Python.
• Experience with version control systems such as Git
• Experience with continuous integration tools (e.g., GitLab-CI, Jenkins).
• Experience with build systems (e.g., Make, CMake).
• Experience with library management and ABI/API version control.
• Understanding of distributed architecture.
• Familiarity with networking protocols (e.g., UDP, TCP, IP) and POSIXstandards.
• Experience in developing multi-threaded applications.

Nice to Haves:

• Familiarity with additional programming languages, such as Go or Rust.
• Experience with embedded Linux operation, including Yocto, device trees, systemd, and Linux on ARM platforms.
• Proficiency with unit test frameworks (e.g., pytest, Googletest, Unity)
• Experience with middleware framework (gRPC, ZMQ/NATS, etc.)
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker, K3S, systemd-nspawn)

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