Principal Software Engineer

Position: Principal Software Engineer (Contract)

This position offers FULLY REMOTE opportunities for candidates across the United States. Preferred work locations:
Arlington VA, Denver CO, Houston, TX or Merritt Island, FL.

Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, Inc offers advanced solutions to meet the most complex U.S. defense, security, space, and intelligence requirements. Celebrating over 50 years in the US, we remain a trusted government partner, leveraging world-class satellite, laser communication, rotor and fixed wing solutions to help our national security, defense and space focused customers meet their missions.

Airbus U.S. looks to employ a commitment driven team, dedicated to enabling our customer's mission success. We are committed to maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment and a welcoming and engaging staff. With competitive compensation and superior employee benefits, as well as a commitment to fostering individual career growth, Airbus U.S. is the place where top talent wants to work.

Position

Summary

Airbus U.S. Space & Defense is looking for an enthusiastic and creative software engineer to develop spacecraft flight software. We're looking for candidates who can bring exceptional embedded programming skills and strong experience in flight software to the team.

Position Responsibilities

The Software Engineer's primary responsibility will be contributing to the development of Airbus U.S.'s satellite flight software. This engineer will be involved in the full lifecycle of flight software development, from requirements definition through operations. However, because we are a small team where each person takes on many roles, this engineer will also contribute to mission concept development, in-house modeling and simulation capabilities, and proposal writing.

Being at the cutting edge of space technology, we need someone who is eager to learn, grow, and take on new and potentially unfamiliar challenges.

The Principal Software Engineer (Contractor) will lead and perform moderate and complex assignments, including providing guidance to junior Software Engineers. The Principal Software Engineer will have project and subject matter responsibility and authority.

Flight Software - 75%

• Upgrade existing flight software for new missions
• Contribute to the development of new satellite flight software for Airbus U.S. satellite platforms
• Develop in-house tools to analyze flight software performance and assess its compatibility with new mission and conops
• Develop and execute flight software tests at the unit, module, subsystem, and platform level
• Work with manufacturing engineers to support installation onto the hardware-in-the-loop test environment and eventual flight hardware
• Participate in anomaly resolution activities and patch existing flight software

Systems Modeling - 15%

• Contribute to the development of systems- and mission-level modeling and simulation tools
• Develop software models of payloads for ground testing
• Support development of software model of satellite platform, particularly ensuring accurate representation of the flight software

Additional Responsibilities - 10%

• Support working groups, both internal and with customers and/or vendors
• Support proposal writing, new business
• Assess the software impacts of new hardware, conops, and missions

Qualified Experience / Skills / Training Education

• Bachelor's degree in STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Math) or related scientific areas.
• Preferred:
  Master's in STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Math) or related scientific areas.

Experience

• A minimum of 15 years with a Bachelor's degree, or 12 years with a Master's degree
• Proven track‑record of working with space hardware and/or flight software systems, starting from conceptual designs and tradeoffs through detailed design, development, manufacture, integration, test, deployment, and operations.

Knowledge, Skills, Demonstrated Capabilities

• Insatiable curiosity and a demonstrated ability to learn and work independently
• Proficiency in C/C++
• Expertise in one or more of the following:
  • Embedded software development (ARM 7 preferred)
  • BSP development
  • Device driver development and software/hardware interfaces (Ethernet/CAN/Space Wire RMAP/1553/RS-422 preferred)
  • New…