Payload Processing Software Engineer, Project Sunrise

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. Join our team of problem solvers as we add new chapters to the history of spaceflight! This role is part of Advanced Concepts and Enterprise Engineering (ACE), supporting Blue Origin’s mission of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.

The team fosters innovation and drives engineering workflows of the future, shared solutions and standards, simplicity and lower costs, and manufacturable design. Join Blue Origin as we build infrastructure in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re developing a satellite constellation of orbital data centers, Sunrise, designed to transform how compute infrastructure is deployed and leveraged. Our team is developing next-generation spacecraft that push the boundaries of performance and capability in orbit.

We are seeking an experienced software engineer to own the payload processing runtime, the engine that drives our in-space computing capabilities. You will be responsible for integrating and optimizing modern parallel computing frameworks and solving one of the hardest software challenges in this domain: maintaining state and ensuring fault tolerance for jobs across intermittent satellite contact windows. If you are an expert in high-performance computing and are excited to build a resilient, computational platform, this role is for you.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Own the architecture and implementation of the on-board payload processing runtime for diverse, high-performance computational workloads.
• Integrate, configure, and optimize accelerator compute frameworks and libraries, including defining workload optimization strategies for our orbital hardware.
• Design and write the core system code from scratch for robust workload checkpointing and state persistence to handle planned and unplanned interruptions in connectivity.
• Define the API contract for job submission and results delivery, collaborating with the compute orchestration team to establish schemas, latency SLAs, and error-handling semantics.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive performance benchmark suite on reference hardware to characterize throughput, latency, and power tradeoffs for various representative workloads.

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years of experience in high-performance computing (HPC), distributed systems engineering, or accelerator-focused software development.
• Direct, hands-on experience deploying and optimizing demanding, data-intensive applications on large-scale accelerated computing systems.
• Strong understanding of accelerator architecture (e.g., GPUs), utilization metrics, memory bandwidth management, and parallel programming models.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, particularly fault tolerance, consensus, and state management in environments with intermittent connectivity.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

• Master’s or Ph.D. in a relevant discipline.
• 10+ years of relevant experience.
• Deep experience with low-level performance tuning and optimization of accelerator kernels.
• Proven ability to design and build complex, stateful, and resilient distributed systems.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies in a production environment.
• Passion for and understanding of AI and Machine Learning applications in engineering, with…