Spire’s Space Services API team develops the interfaces used by our customers to design, test, deploy and operate space-based software applications. In some cases, these applications run on standard Spire hardware, and in some cases on hosted payloads custom-designed by us or our customers.

As a senior software engineer on the Space Services APIs team, you’ll help develop and maintain our customer facing APIs both on the satellite and on the ground. This currently includes interfacing with our disruption tolerant networking stack for both space to ground and inter-satellite links, our satellite bus and ground services that allow customers to task their satellite payloads and upload code and configuration.

You’ll also help drive the product forward by developing new features and services to help customers more easily onboard onto the service, scale their payload constellation and drive operational excellence.

You will interface with the product function and our technical program managers to develop elegant technical solutions to customer needs, together with a team of developers distributed between Europe and the US. Key engineering partners include the Satellite Control Systems, Constellation Scheduling, Platform Software, Systems Engineering and program managers.

You will be part of a nimble and autonomous team yet have access to resources of the rest of Spire’s 200+ person engineering organization including SREs, security engineers, and infrastructure tooling.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development and maturation of Spire’s existing payload tasking systems: design, implementation and deployment

• Develop new space-side applications to orchestrate new customer payloads and leverage new services

• Play a critical role in the execution of customer missions, through design, implementation, launch and commissioning

• Investigate and mitigate issues that arise in production systems

• Liaise with adjacent software teams, technical architects, system engineers, project managers and our customers to deliver on our commitments

• Propose and own new initiatives to drive operational excellence

• Take an active role in reviewing the work of other team members

Basic qualifications / experience

• Solid understanding of software practices such as version control, testing, design, debugging and build systems

• 5+ years experience in professional software development

• Designing and implementing robust and scalable APIs

• Proficiency in programming languages, including both interpreted and compiled

• Cloud / containerization technologies such as AWS, terraform, docker, kubernetes, microservices

• Experience working on a customer facing product

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

• Proficiency with Linux

• Bachelors degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Mathematics or other numerate discipline

Preferred qualifications / experience

• In-depth knowledge of API design principles and best practices, caching strategies, and designing for resiliency and scalability

• Modern CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions, ArgoCD

• Observability platforms such as Elastic Search

• Programming in Python

• Programming in Rust

• Strong relational and non-relational database skills

• Some satellite operations experience is a bonus

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. #LI-MI