Flight Dynamics Software Engineer

Wanna join the adventure?

Loft Orbital is looking for a Flight Dynamics Software Engineer to join the Ground Platform organization.

We're looking for someone with a solid theoretical understanding of astrodynamics, operational flight-dynamics experience, and software-engineering foundations. If you enjoy solving hard problems and working in a fast-paced and supportive environment, we'd love to hear from you.

About Loft Orbital Solutions

Loft: Space Made Simple.

Founded in 2017, Loft provides governments, companies, and research institutions with a fast, reliable, and simple way to deploy missions in orbit.

We integrate, launch, and operate spacecraft, offering end-to-end missions as a service across Earth observation, IoT connectivity, on-orbit AI, national security missions, and more. Leveraging our existing space infrastructure and an extensive inventory of satellite buses, Loft is reducing years-long integration and launch timelines to months. With more than 30 missions flown, Loft’s flight heritage and proven technologies enable customers to focus on their mission objectives.

With a growing fleet on track to reach 30 satellites by 2027, we are scaling up quickly across our offices in San Francisco, CA | Golden, CO | and Toulouse, France to meet accelerating demand for space infrastructure.

As an international company your resume will be reviewed by people across our offices so please attach a copy in English.

Responsibilities

• You'll work on a small and driven team, developing our flight dynamics software stack so that it can:
• Scale to fly 50+ satellites in orbit in a highly automated, reliable, and safe (from a collision avoidance perspective) manner
• Enable new conops and customer missions with demanding orbit determination, stationkeeping, and attitude performance requirements
• Implement and improve upon algorithms for orbit determination, orbit propagation, maneuver planning (stationkeeping/orbit transfer), conjunction assessment, collision avoidance, and attitude modeling, contributing to our open-source astrodynamics tooling that powers both flight operations and simulation work across the company
• Develop and maintain the in-house flight dynamics ground software backend applications that compute, store, and serve our fleet’s ephemerides, maneuvers, conjunctions, target orbits, etc
• Interface with systems and
• to help translate
• mission requirements and customer demands into operational outcomes in orbit
• Support satellite operations engineers
• by providing astrodynamics expertise during LEOP/anomalies/conjunction response and assisting with configuring our software stack for various customer missions

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in physics or an engineering discipline

Deep technical understanding of some of the following topics

• orbital mechanics, state estimation, spacecraft maneuver planning, conjunction assessment, and spacecraft attitude modeling
• Fundamentals of numerical methods: solvers, optimization, and simulation techniques
• Experience with designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal

Preferred

Master’s degree in physics or an engineering discipline

• Proficiency in astrodynamics tools such as STK, Astrogator, GMAT, OreKit, Monte, Copernicus, OpenSpaceToolkit, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated practical experience in spacecraft constellation flight dynamics operations
• Demonstrated practical experience building high-performance backend software applications and/or libraries
• Capable of solving complex problems within a highly collaborative environment

Benefits

• Equity, we want you to have an active role in our success
• Up to 35 days of Paid Time Off (vacations & RTT ) and flexible working hours, we want you to be at your best
• Health and life insurance, we care about your health
• Lunch Vouchers, because let’s be honest, we love food! (we even have a slack channel about it #loft-gourmand
• Cross-office travel opportunities between San Francisco, Colorado, and Toulouse to learn from our differences
• Company and team off-sites and many other events to work & celebrate together
• Relocation assistance to Toulouse when applicable

*Research shows that while men apply to jobs where they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other underrepresented people tend to only apply when they meet 100% of the qualifications. At Loft, we value respectful debate and people who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions. We strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t check all the boxes.