Senior Flight Software/Firmware Engineer

About Us

Our mission is to safeguard critical space infrastructure by providing the first integrated security platform to see threats, decide fast and respond at scale. Where spacecraft have traditionally been costly, slow to produce and require extensive effort to coordinate, SMC is developing systems that are produced at scale and operated with human-on-the-loop autonomy to drastically reduce the cost and complexity of orbital operations.

As space becomes more congested and contested, the satellites that underpin modern life, including communications, navigation, financial systems, are increasingly exposed. We are developing the vehicles and software to protect them, working with commercial operators and government agencies across allied nations.

Our approach is grounded in economics as much as engineering. The Optimus Viper Rapid Response Vehicle delivers genuine mission capability at a fraction of conventional spacecraft cost, designed for high-volume production and rapid deployment across all orbital regimes. Solstice OS, our AI-driven command and control platform, fuses space domain awareness data and automates mission planning and vehicle coordination, allowing smaller teams to manage larger constellations and respond to emerging situations in seconds rather than hours.

The future of space depends on assets that can be inspected, monitored and protected in orbit. We are building the technology to make that possible.

Why Join Us

We’re a start up. Things move fast, resources are lean, and we’re building as we go.

What we offer is opportunity: to learn at speed, grow with the company, and leave your fingerprints on something that’s never been done before. At Space Machines Company, engineers, innovators, and problem solvers join forces to push the limits of what’s possible.

If you want to build technology designed to protect and power humanity’s future in space and see your work make a visible impact. This is where you’ll do it.

How We Work

We are builders first.

We approach every challenge through a cycle of design, build, test, and refine, making ideas real, learning from results, and improving with each iteration.

We challenge assumptions to make sure we’re solving the right problems, and we strengthen our solutions through collaboration and feedback.

We use process where it adds value and set it aside where it slows us down. There are a lot of firsts here, and we meet them with curiosity and courage.

We win as one team.

Requirements

You will be one of the core engineers building the flight software that operates our spacecraft. The scope is wide: rather than implementing someone else's specification, you will own your work from the initial requirements through to proving it on real hardware.

Primary Focus (Firmware Development, Integration, and FSW)

• Firmware Development: Develop firmware for the control units of our satellite subsystems. This includes deriving requirements and defining architecture to implementation and testing. You will collaborate closely with stakeholders who provide the core algorithms to execute and the operational constraints to meet.
• Hardware Interfacing: You will act as the primary interface between the Software and Hardware teams, ensuring that the in-house OBC (where the flight software runs) aligns with what the SW team expects. This includes managing the integration and verification of hard core IP (processor subsystem) and soft core IP (FPGA fabric) with firmware and BSPs, making any necessary modifications to the BSP or firmware layer to reflect hardware updates.
• Subsystem Integration: Integrate subsystems units (thermal control, radio, propulsion, GNSS, attitude control, payload, and power). For each vendor or in-house product, you will review documentation, agree on interfaces, bring up the bus, write the driver, implement the state machine, and validate it.
• Core Flight Software: Drive the requirements, architecture, implementation, and rigorous testing of the flight software such as telemetry downlink, command uplink, health monitoring, communication, control of external control units via interfaces such as CAN, RS-422/485, and Ethernet.

Broader Contributions

• Third-Party Software: Track upstream versions, review critical-path code, patch defects, contribute fixes upstream, and maintain internal mirrors for strict supply-chain control.
• Functional System Architecture: Decompose spacecraft-level requirements into the specific state machines and FDIR (failure detection, isolation, and recovery) behaviors the software will implement. You will be writing the specification the software is built against.
• Ground Segment Interface: Integrate the ground station with the flight software protocol and validate the end-to-end communication path.
• Infrastructure: Maintain CI/CD automation.

About You

You'll thrive in this role if you bring:

A builder's mindset - turning concepts into flight-ready hardware through hands-on design, analysis and testing.

An iterative approach - designing, building, testing, learning, and improving with each cycle.

Collaboration and curiosity - working across disciplines and with external partners, and exploring beyond your own expertise.

Adaptability and ownership - thriving in a fast-scaling, evolving environment and driving outcomes end to end without waiting for perfect specifications.

Proven experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience) plus 5+ years of hands-on software development experience.
• Embedded firmware development in C (and C++) for microcontrollers (e.g. ARM Cortex-M series such as STM32) or SoCs, bare-metal and/or under an RTOS.
• Board support package work: bringing up a BSP on new hardware and maintaining it as the design changes based on a vendor BSP as delivered.
• SoC processor subsystem configuration: clocks, resets, pin multiplexing, memory map, peripheral setup and boot flow.
• Integrating FPGA fabric IP with software: memory-mapped register interfaces, bus interfaces between fabric and processor, and fabric-sourced interrupts.
• Reading schematics and datasheets, and judging what they mean for the software.
• Debugging across the hardware/software boundary with JTAG/SWD, logic analyser and oscilloscope.
• Working directly with hardware engineers: reviewing designs and getting software requirements reflected in them.
• Embedded Linux Expertise: Demonstrated experience building, customizing (Yocto or similar), and bringing up a distribution on custom hardware.
• C/C++: Proficiency in C++ within resource-constrained embedded contexts, coupled with the ability to comfortably read and patch C.
• Hands-On Debugging: Experience bringing up devices and isolating faults on real hardware using CAN, RS-422/485, and Ethernet, utilizing appropriate hardware instruments.
• Vendor Integration: Experience in integrating third-party hardware from vendor documentation.
• Full-Lifecycle Engineering: Experience deriving and writing your own requirements, writing automated tests for embedded software, experience with Git, CMake and Python.

Bonus experience:

• Background in high-reliability or safety-critical embedded systems (spacecraft, avionics, medical, or industrial) where manual recovery from a failure is impossible.
• Familiarity with spacecraft communication protocols (CSP, CCSDS, CFDP) or component-based flight software frameworks (F’).
• Experience with RISC-V, specifically the Microchip PolarFire SoC.
• Experience programming FPGAs using HDL (VHDL or Verilog), including designing and implementing the software-facing interfaces within the programmable logic.

Benefits

What You Actually Get

You won't get rich quickly. But you'll get:

Competitive salary - Fair pay for hard work. Commensurate with experience and the impact you'll have.

Meaningful equity (ESOP) - Real ownership stake. Stock options that matter because you're joining early enough for them to matter. If we win, you win.

Actual leave - Annual leave plus personal/sick days. Because even warriors need to recover.

Public holidays - All of them.

And freedom. Real freedom to build, decide, and move without waiting for permission. That's not a benefit you'll find in a package description, but it's worth more than most perks on this list.