Software Engineer
Posted 8 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Senior Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 10+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
No salary listed for this role.
Field of studyComputer Engineering, Computer Science (or related)
Study levelBachelor's
Power the future of Space at Star Catcher
Star Catcher is building the first energy grid in space to power the orbital economy.
Today’s spacecraft must generate all of their own power, which caps what they can do and how long they can operate. But what if they could “plug” into a grid, the way buildings do on Earth? Instead of cables and outlets, Star Catcher is building the technology to wirelessly beam energy to spacecraft’s existing solar panels when and where they need it.
Be an early member of a team building an entirely new energy infrastructure at scale to power the next frontier.
Star Catcher Industries, Inc., located in Jacksonville, Florida, has an opportunity for a Senior Software Engineer - Ground & Mission Systems to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead ground segment software architecture and co-own flight/ground interfaces, including telemetry visualization, command planning, and data processing pipelines for mission operations.
- Lead full software development lifecycle execution for ground and mission systems, including requirements flow-down, design, hardware/software integration and test, verification, transition to production, and fielded product support.
- Architect real-time and near-real-time telemetry ingestion, processing, and storage pipelines, including frame/packet decommutation, time-series storage, and limit-checking/alerting for spacecraft health and status.
- Define command planning, sequencing, and validation workflows, ensuring safe command uplink and interfacing with ground station scheduling and pass-planning systems.
- Define interfaces between ground tooling and spacecraft systems alongside embedded/flight software and electrical engineering teams, including telemetry/command dictionaries and interface control documents.
- Set standards for ground software architecture, APIs, service-oriented design, and CI/CD practices, including containerization and deployment strategy.
- Establish observability practices (logging, metrics, alerting) for ground and mission systems to support on-call operations.
- Mentor ground/mission systems engineers and lead design reviews.
- Support internal software architecture and code quality practices across ground and non-embedded systems.
Basic Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 10+ years of professional experience building production software systems (services, APIs, data pipelines, or engineering tooling), with demonstrated experience owning system architecture.