Principal Software Engineer Job Northern Kentucky USA,Software Development

Position Title:

Principal Software Engineer

Clearance Requirement:
Must be able to obtain a Top-Secret security clearance. U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance.

About Us:

Black Ve, Inc. is a mission-first, dynamic, and innovative national security-focused company focused on emerging space and advanced technologies dedicated to pushing the boundaries of engineering excellence in support of our government customers.

Job Description:

We're hiring a Principal Flight Software Engineer to contribute to the design, development, and delivery of embedded flight software for our spacecraft. This is a senior individual contributor role with outsized influence — you'll make foundational architecture decisions, write performance-critical code, and set the technical direction for how our vehicles operate on orbit. You'll work closely with systems and hardware engineers from requirements through integration and test, and your software will fly.

Key Responsibilities and

Essential Job Functions:

Architecting and implementing embedded flight software for spacecraft avionics, including command and data handling, fault management, and mode control
Developing software for real-time or near-real-time, resource-constrained embedded platforms
Translating system and subsystem requirements into flight software designs, and owning those designs through implementation, test, and integration
Defining and enforcing flight software architecture patterns, coding standards, and interface contracts
Collaborating with GNC, power, thermal, comms, and payload engineers to integrate flight software with hardware and subsystem firmware
Designing and executing software verification and validation activities, including unit test, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and flight software qualification
Supporting integration, environmental test, and on-orbit commissioning of flight software
Mentoring junior engineers and contributing to the technical culture of the software team

Required Qualifications:

10+ years of professional experience developing embedded software, with significant time spent on spacecraft flight software
Deep expertise in C and/or C++ for real-time, resource-constrained embedded systems
Experience with spacecraft avionics buses and interfaces (e.g., Space Wire, MIL-STD-1553, CAN, SPI, I2C, UART)
Strong understanding of flight software architecture patterns: command dispatch, telemetry, fault protection, sequencing, and mode management
Experience with software integration and test on flight or flight-like hardware, including hardware-in-the-loop environments
Ability to work across disciplinary boundaries with systems, GNC, and hardware engineers
U.S. citizenship and ability to obtain a DoD security clearance

Preferred Qualifications:

Hands-on experience with RTOS environments (e.g., VxWorks, RTEMS, FreeRTOS, Zephyr) or bare-metal development
Flight heritage — software you wrote has operated on orbit
Experience with software-defined or reprogrammable spacecraft architectures
Familiarity with autonomous or semi-autonomous spacecraft operations (onboard planning, event-driven tasking, or adaptive fault management)
Experience with formal verification, model-based development, or runtime assurance techniques for safety-critical software
Exposure to GPU, FPGA, or heterogeneous compute platforms in a flight context
Familiarity with flight software frameworks (e.g., cFS, F Prime, or comparable in-house frameworks)
Experience in a small-team or startup environment where you wore multiple hats

Location and Travel Requirements:

This position is based in Albuquerque, NM, with occasional travel to other company locations or partner facilities as needed.

Why Join Us:

Mission first-Always. We prioritize delivering results that directly support…