Director of Software Engineering

Responsibilities

• We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team’s respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title
• Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations
• Set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure
• Stay hands‑on: review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters
• Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them
• Be the person engineers come to when the problem is genuinely hard
• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world‑class reliability and platform engineers
• Set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege
• Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of
• Identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management
• Lead the shift from manual, operator‑driven processes to fully automated and self‑healing operations
• Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation
• Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions
• Be the technical voice of the team in company‑wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy
• Influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization

• Name your own satellite:
  Be remembered throughout time by choosing a name for a LEMUR satellite.
• Family Leave:
  Family is important. Our parental and family leave is designed to let you make the most of those precious moments.
• Learning & development:
  Spire more than encourages and supports ongoing personal improvement and a growth mindset, we welcome it!
• Launch Attendance:
  One of the perks from launching satellites into space is that Spire often has VIP access to view the launch.
• Generous time off policy:
  Take the time you need. Our flexible time‑off policy promotes a positive work‑life balance.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP):
  Our EAP makes sure you have access to support and counseling sessions whenever you need it.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP):
  Our ESPP provides eligible employees with an opportunity to purchase Spire shares through accumulated contributions.
• Fitness Reimbursement:
  Spire encourages fitness activity to promote employee well‑being with reimbursed gym membership expenses.
• Employee Referral Program:
  Spire is always looking for outstanding people to join our team, and you can help and be awarded a referral bonus.
• Healthy snacks & beverages:
  To help our employees to be as productive as possible, we provide healthy snacks and beverages in each of our offices.

• Experience hiring and developing engineers.
• You know what great looks like and how to find it.
• Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale.
• You have owned things that could not go down.
• Deep technical credibility.
• Engineers on your teams have respected your judgment and not just your title.
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large‑scale automation.
• You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it.
• The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff‑level individual contributor role.
• Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems.
• Experience writing performance software in Rust.
• Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real‑time environments.
• Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale.
• A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo.