Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Power the future of Space at Star Catcher

Star Catcher is powering the future of space by building the world’s first orbital energy grid: the Star Catcher Network. Spacecraft connect into the Star Catcher Network and receive conditioned energy via their existing solar arrays, requiring no retrofit to utilize the first true space-based infrastructure. The Star Catcher Network provides power as needed from tens of Watts to tens of thousands of Watts at concentrations from fractions of a Sun of flux to ten Suns of flux.

The Star Catcher Network enables More Uptime, More Bandwidth, and More Mission.

Join our team of experienced and passionate space innovators driven to transform and expand humanity’s utilization of space. The creation of space-based power infrastructure is as impactful for space missions in the 2020’s and 2030’s as the advent of low-cost launch services was in the 2010’s. We seek individuals who share our passion for enabling people to do more in space and are not afraid to get their hands dirty to make our vision of the future reality.

Star Catcher Industries, Inc. (Star Catcher), located in Jacksonville, FL, has an opportunity for a Senior Embedded & Flight Software Engineer to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid. This role will help build the software that runs our missions, from onboard flight and payload software to the ground systems that support development, integration, and mission operations.

• Flight & Embedded Software: Design, implement, and validate real-time embedded software for spacecraft payload and subsystem control. Develop firmware, device drivers, and middleware running on bare-metal and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), with an emphasis on determinism and maintainability.
• Bus & Systems Management: Develop software supporting spacecraft bus management, including command and telemetry processing, subsystem coordination, and onboard autonomy. Implement robust interfaces using communication protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, RS-422, and, where applicable, Space Wire and CCSDS standards.
• Hardware Integration & FDIR: Collaborate closely with electrical and hardware teams to support board bring-up, boot loader development, backplane and compute-module integration (e.g., SpaceVPX/VPX), and peripheral integration. Implement robust Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) strategies, watchdog mechanisms, redundancy management, and health monitoring.
• Requirements & Verification: Participate in software requirements development, verification, validation, and design reviews to ensure complete traceability from requirements through flight qualification.
• Ground Support & Automation: Design and maintain software tools supporting hardware bring-up, automated testing, mission operations, and telemetry visualization. Develop automation tools using Python, C++, or similar languages to improve engineering productivity and test repeatability.
• Testing & Verification: Develop automated unit, integration, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test suites. Perform fault-injection testing and simulation to verify software robustness under off-nominal conditions, and participate in environmental test campaigns (e.g., thermal-vacuum, vibration, EMI/EMC).
• Architecture & Code Quality: Design scalable, maintainable software architectures. Utilize modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD pipelines, static analysis tools, automated builds, and structured code reviews to ensure mission assurance throughout the spacecraft lifecycle.
• Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers while helping establish software development standards,…