Principal Vehicle Software Engineer

Who we are: 

EOI Space is developing and deploying a network of satellites in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) to provide ultra-high-resolution Earth imagery.  We aim to deliver timely and actionable data for commercial and defense applications.  

We are on our way to achieving many industry firsts.  This demands an ambitious team that thrives on challenges, takes ownership, and collaborates deeply.  EOI Space is looking for a Principal Vehicle Software Engineer.  In this hands-on technical leader role, you will have the opportunity to drive the end-to-end vehicle software solution, contributing to the payload processor subsystem, the bus flight software, and firmware components of each.  These pillars support all aspects of our mission: a safe and healthy spacecraft, capable of collecting, onboard processing, downlink of exquisite imagery, and maintaining a stable VLEO orbit for years. 

What you will do:  

• Provide technical leadership to a small team 

• Coordinate, code, and lead implementation of cluster management and workload coordination systems and tools to manage the HPC cluster in the payload system 

• Implement and test highly optimized GPU-aware containerized image processing workloads on the cluster 

• Contribute to and integrate with cFS-based bus flight software 

• Guide and coordinate firmware development work to ensure that hardware and firmware designs mesh together to implement required system functions 

• Collaborate with the Principal Ground Software Engineer and vehicle and ground System Engineers to develop complete, holistic solutions to meet mission requirements  

• Work hand in hand with Security, Export Compliance, and DevOps/Platform engineering to ensure we can deploy and maintain test, qualification, and flight–level updates 

• Operate in a lean start-up environment, maintaining a laser focus on the balance between what we need today and the things we are excited to add and enhance tomorrow 

Responsibilities: 

• Champion our development team principles: 

• Clear and explicit communication, within and between the teams across the company 

• Develop iteratively, integrate early and often, and coordinate functional cross-team demos of the iterative releases 

• End-to-end observable and traceable systems 

• Aggressively, but with discipline and structure, leverage agentic tools (Claude code) to accelerate design, implementation, test, and workflow activities 

• Plan, define, prioritize, and track design and development activities to meet milestones and support inter-team dependencies 

• Work with other team leads to make sure basic “steel thread” system capabilities are established early and continuously refined and matured 

• Develop and deploy both image processing workload and cluster orchestration software to bench, rack, and flight versions of the payload processing system 

• Support integration of the Payload subsystem with bus Flight Software, Wideband RF communications systems, and ground and space-based image processing pipelines 

• Support firmware development efforts including bare-metal microcontrollers, FPGAs, Yocto device trees, and bootloaders  

• Support testing and qualification campaigns as well as on-orbit updates 

• Optimize for space flight by selecting and applying lightweight but modern OSS frameworks and tools, applied in a bandwidth-conscious way to support on-orbit updates to any level of the system (BSP, OS, and applications) 

Required Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field 

• High competency with both scripted and compiled/type-checked languages (e.g. Python, C++, Go) 

• 10+ years total experience in professional software engineering 

• Experience with scheduler-driven, resource-constrained flight software development (ideally NASA Core Flight Systems) 

• Exposure to embedded device development  

• Experience with deploying software to intermittently connected edge compute environments 

• Relevant experience will include OS level programming, containerized cluster management, embedded systems development, hardware acceleration, and a solid understanding of tradeoffs between features and footprint 

Desired Qualifications: 

• NVIDIA Jetson and CUDA programming experience 

• Bootloader, Yocto device tree, and FPGA development experience 

• Containerized workload management (Kubernetes) 

• Container building and optimization experience. 

• Experience building and optimizing scalable distributed image processing workflows 

Compensation:  

The salary range for this role is $190,000 - $240,000 per year, depending on previous experience. Pay ranges are determined by role, level, location, and alignment with market data. Individual pay will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: interviews and an assessment of several factors that are unique to each candidate, job-related skills, relevant education and experience, certifications, abilities of the candidate and internal equity.  

Work Location:  

This is an onsite role to be located in Louisville, CO. 

Benefits: 

The health and safety of our employees and their families come first.  In addition to competitive salary and equity, we offer medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance coverage, unlimited paid time off, 12 paid holidays, parental leave, and 401K.  The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits at any time.