Senior Software Engineer, IR Data Products

About the role

Muon Space is building and operating a growing portfolio of infrared (IR) space missions that generate mission-critical Earth observation data for a diverse and expanding set of customers. These missions include the FireSat constellation, which delivers calibrated IR imagery and derived wildfire products to wildfire operators, the scientific community, the US Government, and commercial partners; and the Space Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) mission, which provides data for weather and cloud characterization, situational awareness, and a broad range of additional use cases. Muon's IR Data Products team owns the multi-mission, multi-customer software systems that process, store, and disseminate the data from these missions - turning raw downlink into calibrated imagery and derived products, and delivering those products reliably to customers at scale.

In this role, you will build, harden, and operate the production pipelines and services that process and serve data from Muon’s Infrared missions - with an emphasis on robust processing pipelines, low latency, strong observability, and geospatial data serving. The ideal candidate is a hands-on senior engineer who has shipped and operated production geospatial or scientific data pipelines at scale. They combine strong software engineering fundamentals with real geospatial domain knowledge and take pride in building systems that are legible, observable, and easy for the rest of the team to reason about.

In this role, the candidate will initially focus on three key areas:

• Robust production pipelines: Design, implement, and operate high-reliability data pipelines that process captures from L0 through L1 imagery, multispectral stacks, orthomosaic tiles, and derived wildfire products. Implement robust error handling, idempotency, caching, reprocessing, and safe rollout across the trunk-based release process.
• Low-latency optimization: Design and implement improvements to the software system that minimize the end-to-end latency of data processing and dissemination. Optimize cloud infrastructure and services, implement algorithm speed-ups, and reduce computational cost.
• Geospatial data hosting and serving: Build and operate data hosting and serving services that support internal and customer-facing search and retrieval, visualization, and data dissemination. Develop and implement schemas, ingest paths, a STAC catalog, and query APIs.

Additionally, the role will partner closely with our Remote Sensing Data Scientists to harden research code into production stages, and will interface with other software teams such as Data Platform and Flight Software on shared contracts (capture metadata, navigation products and telemetry interfaces).

This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our Denver, CO office three days per week.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the production pipelines that process IR Mission captures through L1 imagery, multispectral stacking, geolocation, orthomosaic tiles, hotspots, and derived wildfire products.
• Optimize pipeline infrastructure, services, and algorithms to minimize latency.
• Design and build geospatial data discovery and data-serving infrastructure and APIs used by internal product developers and downstream customers.
• Design and build internal data-visualization and inspection tools for geospatial data.
• Maintain and improve the software testing and release infrastructure and processes.
• Partner with Remote Sensing Data Scientists to productionize research code - hardening error paths, adding tests, adding observability, and making it re-runnable and idempotent.
• Build observability of the IR data pipeline end-to-end: structured logging, dashboards, metrics and alerts.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years or MS with 6+ years or PhD with 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience shipping and operating production Python data pipelines and backend services on AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with a modern workflow orchestrator (e.g., Flyte, Airflow, Prefect, Argo, Dagster, or similar) and containerized deployments.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: production Python code, unit and integration testing, Git-based trunk development, code review, CI/CD, etc.
• Demonstrated experience adding production-grade observability to a system: structured logging, metrics, dashboards, alerts, and on-call ownership.
• Working geospatial domain knowledge - hands-on experience with common geospatial libraries (e.g., GDAL/OGR, rasterio, PROJ, shapely) and formats (e.g., GeoTIFF, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, NetCDF, Zarr, HDF).
• Ability to work with a distributed, interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and program management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building and operating a STAC catalog (stac-fastapi, pystac, pgstac, or equivalent) and associated ingest and query paths.
• Experience with xarray / Zarr / NetCDF at scale, including chunked processing and streaming reads from S3.
• Experience building internal data-visualization or inspection tools (dashboards, map viewers, notebook-based workflows) that support scientific debugging.
• Experience with Grafana, LogQL, Prometheus, or InfluxDB in production.
• Experience with satellite ground-segment concepts (downlink, telemetry, capture / swath structure) or other remote-sensing data pipelines.
• Experience with Flyte / Union.ai specifically.
• Terraform / IaC experience for AWS resources.
• Experience productionizing research or scientific code written by non-engineers.

Salary

The salary range for this role is $192,000 - $213,000, plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits package. Final compensation will be determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location as assessed during the interview process. 

About Muon Space

Founded in 2021, Muon Space is an end-to-end Space Systems Provider that designs, builds, and operates LEO satellite constellations delivering mission-critical data. Our revolutionary, integrated technology stack enables customers to optimize every dimension of their missions for faster time-to-orbit and superior constellation remote sensing performance. Our state-of-the-art facility in the heart of Silicon Valley is optimized for manufacturing spacecraft and rapid, flexible payload integration at scale. From climate monitoring to national security, Muon Space is dedicated to delivering Earth Intelligence for a safer and more resilient world.

Taking Care of Our Team

At Muon salary is only part of our total compensation package. In addition to salary, full-time employees receive equity compensation as well as benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401k retirement plan, short & long term disability and life insurance. We also offer three weeks paid vacation for new employees, along with 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time and paid parental leave. 

Our mission embraces the entire planet and we believe our team should too.  Muon is dedicated to creating a diverse and dynamic company and workforce. We believe in equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, age, national origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or gender identity. We value diversity in the workplace, and that starts with our applicants. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check all the boxes, and we look forward to reviewing your application! In addition, if you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

Muon is currently registered and able to hire in the following states:

AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, IA, ID, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, TN, TX, VT, VA, WA

ITAR/EAR Requirements

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. The Company may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.