Flight Software Engineer

About Era Drive

Era Drive builds autonomy software and hardware that let spacecraft see, decide, and act with minimal human supervision. Our software is already flying on multiple satellites. Era-Node is our autonomous software+hardware payload for optical positioning, navigation and timing, and we are growing the team that will build its flight software.

The role

You will own the architecture, implementation, and verification of Era-Node’s flight software. You will work closely with GNC engineers and embedded software engineers and you will be the technical authority on how the flight software is structured, built, tested, and updated.

What you will do

• Define the flight software architecture, including the framework or executive it is built on, and document the reasoning

• Design the core services: command and telemetry, data management, event and message handling, timing, and health monitoring

• Design and implement fault detection, isolation, and recovery procedures, including mode management and safe-mode behavior

• Define and maintain interface control documents for Era-Node’s integration with the host spacecraft and onboard avionics

• Maintain the continuous integration pipeline and software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop test environments

• Set coding standards for deterministic, bounded-resource flight code and enforce them in CI

• Package and integrate the software with the host platform, working alongside the GNC engineers who own the algorithm flight code and the embedded engineers who own hardware-to-software interfaces

What you bring

• 5+ years of professional experience in flight software for satellite buses or satellite payloads

• Strong C++ and C skills on embedded Linux, including  or comparable real-time configurations, device drivers, and boot and update flows

• Hands-on experience with a flight software framework (for example cFS or F´), or with designing command and data handling software from scratch

• Experience with fault management, telemetry and command design, and interface control documents

• Experience with software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing

• Comfort reading and integrating research-grade code written by scientists and engineers

• Clear technical writing and communication skills

Bonus

• Experience with space environment effects on software, such as radiation-induced faults and mitigation

• Familiarity with CCSDS standards

• Experience integrating star trackers, cameras, or precision timing hardware

• Background in orbital mechanics or spacecraft GNC