Navigation Engineer (Embedded Software)

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain embedded flight software for onboard navigation capabilities in modern C/C++.
• Design and implement low-level software interfaces for navigation-related sensors, timing sources, processors, avionics, and spacecraft data buses.
• Develop device drivers, board support interfaces, and hardware abstraction layers for flight and test environments.
• Implement real-time onboard data acquisition, validation, buffering, timestamping, routing, and persistence for navigation-relevant telemetry and measurements.
• Integrate onboard estimation, propagation, timing, and sensor-processing components into a reliable flight software application.
• Design, implement, and validate flight software interfaces to command and telemetry systems, vehicle state management, fault management, guidance and control, mission operations, and ground software.
• Implement FDIR logic for navigation-related sensors, software tasks, data flows, timing behavior, estimator health, and off-nominal spacecraft conditions.
• Build autonomous recovery behavior for degraded navigation modes, sensor dropouts, invalid data, processor resets, timing discontinuities, and interface failures.
• Develop deterministic, resource-conscious software for embedded Linux, RTOS, PREEMPT_RT, or bare-metal flight environments.
• Optimize onboard software for reliability, bounded latency, memory usage, deterministic execution, and graceful degradation under flight constraints.
• Define and implement software data models, message schemas, configuration handling, telemetry products, command interfaces, and onboard data management workflows.
• Support hardware-software integration across common spacecraft interfaces.
• Build simulation, software-in-the-loop, processor-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, and deterministic replay infrastructure to validate onboard navigation behavior before flight.
• Develop unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, fault-injection tests, interface tests, and automated validation pipelines for flight software releases.
• Work closely with astrodynamics, state estimation, GNSS, timing, avionics, flight software, ground software, and mission operations teams to define clean interfaces and integrated workflows.
• Support board bring-up, sensor integration, spacecraft integration and test, environmental test, commissioning, flight-data investigations, and anomaly response as needed.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related STEM field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of relevant professional experience developing embedded software, flight software, avionics software, robotics software, spacecraft software, or other high-reliability real-time software. Strong project or graduate research experience may substitute for some professional experience.
• Proficiency in modern C++ for embedded or resource-constrained software development.
• Experience developing software for embedded systems.
• Working knowledge of hardware-software interfaces.
• Working knowledge of software integration with sensors, avionics, timing sources, or spacecraft subsystems.
• Experience building automated tests, simulation tools, hardware-in-the-loop tests, or other validation infrastructure for embedded systems.
• Experience with Linux-based development environments, Git, CMake or similar build systems, and automated testing workflows.
• Working knowledge related to debugging numerical or floating-point issues.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant experience and the ability to independently own technical workstreams.
• Experience developing flight software for spacecraft, launch vehicles, aircraft, autonomous systems, robotics, or other mission-critical embedded platforms.
• Experience with spacecraft avionics, flight processors, board bring-up, sensor integration, or flight hardware integration and test.
• Experience implementing FDIR, redundancy management, degraded-mode operation, watchdog handling, or autonomous recovery logic.
• Experience with navigation-related flight software, GNSS receivers, timing systems, etc.
• Experience designing telemetry and command interfaces, onboard data products, configuration systems, and operational software workflows.
• Experience with deterministic replay, fault injection, Monte Carlo testing, software-in-the-loop, processor-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, or mission operations support.
• Experience with high-reliability software practices, requirements traceability, code reviews, static analysis, CI/CD, and release processes for flight or safety-critical systems.
• Familiarity with CCSDS, spacecraft command and telemetry systems, flight data handling, or ground-to-flight software interfaces.
• Ability and willingness to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government Security Clearance
• Even if you don’t meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. We value strong fundamentals, sound judgment, and growth potential, and we know great candidates do not always match every item on a job description.

Additional Information