Senior Software Engineer - Tasking and Planning

Location:

Valencia

Employment Type:

Full time

Location Type:
On-site

Department:
Engineering

• Senior Software Engineer - Tasking and Planning
• Location:
  
  Valencia, Spain
• Department:
  Signal Processing
• Reports to:
  
  Engineering Manager
• Employment type:
  
  Permanent
• Workplace model:
  Hybrid (3 days per week in office)
• Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required)

As Senior Software Engineer on the Acquisition Planning team, you will build the software systems that enable ICEYE and its customers to task satellites, plan data acquisitions, and turn orbital mechanics into operational intelligence capability. From pass prediction and coverage computation engines to event-driven backend services and the engineering interfaces that let users visualise and de-conflict collection plans, you will own the stack end-to-end – working directly alongside engineers and product managers with deep operational backgrounds to understand what users need and ship software that delivers it.

This is an early-stage, high-autonomy role where you will help define the architecture and direction of a platform that sits at the intersection of software engineering, applied mathematics, and real-world intelligence operations.

• Tasking and Planning Engines. Orbit propagation, pass prediction, acquisition geometry, sensor configuration parameters, and coverage footprint computation. Applied science mathematics turned into operational capability via Software.
• Platform Services. Backend services handling task management. Event-driven workers performing opportunity calculation and synchronising state asynchronously via NATS Jet Stream. Postgre
  
  SQL for persistence. Responsiveness and resilience at the service of the mission.
• Engineering Interfaces. Robust and evolvable APIs and UIs that enable engineers to visualise passes, compare collection plans, plan tasks, and self-service their access to space.
• Whatever the future brings. Multi-sensor coordination, processing pipeline integration, new collection strategies, and capabilities that will emerge from close collaboration with users. You will help define the direction, not just execute it.

Must haves:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals. You design decoupled, maintainable, resilient, performant systems. You can reason about concurrency and how transactions work. You know about CAP and regularly make deliberate trade-offs between Consistency and Availability. You understand the difference between “At most once”, “At least once” and how to design systems around those guarantees.
• Production experience. You have designed, built, and operated services in production: REST APIs, relational databases, and asynchronous workers. You know how to make your systems observable and resilient. You understand what production demands beyond making things work locally.
• Fast learner in technical domains. This role involves orbital mechanics, RF physics, and geospatial data. You don’t need to come in knowing these — but you do need to be the kind of engineer who can pick up a new domain quickly, ask sharp questions, and start contributing before you’ve mastered every detail.
• Ability to work from ambiguity. You can take a loosely defined operational need (e.g. “we need users to de-conflict between competing collection plans”) and turn it into concrete engineering work. You ask the right questions, make well-reasoned decisions, and adjust when new information arrives.
• Effective communication across domains. You will work alongside people who think in many different ways and work in different contexts. You can listen carefully, ask precise questions, and articulate technical tradeoffs in terms that everybody can understand, and adjust to your audience accordingly.
• AI advocacy
  . You understand that AI is restructuring how knowledge work is done and that early, decisive adoption creates compounding advantages. You view mastering AI collaboration as a core engineering competency, not an optional extra.

Nice to haves:

• Event-driven architecture. Experience with NATS, Kafka, SQS, or similar. Understanding of…