About the Company:

We are a stealth-mode Aerospace & Defense startup headquartered in El Segundo, CA. Our founding team hails from SpaceX, Anduril, and Lockheed Martin, and we are backed by Joint Staff-level military leadership and several  Silicon Valley firms. With a world-class business development & leadership team already in place, we are well positioned to capitalize on already overwhelming demand.

Job Overview: 

We’re seeking a Lead Flight Software Engineer to drive the architecture, development, and deployment of the embedded flight software stack for our first life saving system. You’ll be responsible for building a safe, secure, and performant flight software platform. As a founding engineering leader, you’ll shape not just the product, but the engineering culture, processes, and technical trajectory of the company.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and implement real-time embedded flight software for guidance, navigation, and control systems
• Own the full software lifecycle: requirements, architecture, implementation, verification, deployment, and field test
• Interface with hardware, GNC, autonomy, and test teams to integrate firmware and flight software into a mission-ready stack
• Lead code reviews, system simulations, and HITL testing
• Develop fault-tolerant architectures and hardware abstraction layers that support rapid iteration without compromising safety
• Guide build systems, CI/CD pipelines, and dev environments for embedded development
• Mentor junior engineers and help scale the software team

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related
• 8+ years of experience writing real-time embedded software in C/C++
• Experience leading development of flight software for aerospace, defense, or autonomous systems
• Strong understanding of RTOS concepts, state machines, sensor/actuator interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN), and control loops
• Experience debugging on real hardware using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD tools

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree or higher in a relevant engineering discipline
• Familiarity with GNC algorithms, simulation, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) testing
• Familiarity with Rust or Python for testing and tooling is a plus
• Experience with embedded Linux and NVIDIA Jetpack Linux
• Experience with NixOS for reproducible image deployment