Backend Software Engineer - Mission Planning Strategy

Wanna join the adventure?

• Loft Orbital is looking for a Backend Software Engineer to join the
• Mission Platform organization.

About Loft Orbital Solutions

High-performance computing

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 a brand new software product that optimizes tasking across a large heterogeneous constellation of multi-sensor satellites:
• scale to fly 50+ satellites, serving 100,000s of customer tasking orders
• design, build and optimize a brand new product from scratch
• solve chall
• enging proble
• Astrodynamics, satellite capacity modeling and simulation
• Back-end/API performance
• Low latency, high responsiveness system design
• Mathematical optimization and scheduling problems
• Develop and improve
• a new software product that manages customer orders across a multi-sensor constellation of satellites
• Interface w
• ith teams
• to help design the customer-facing interfaces and the back-end pipeline that goes from a plan to onboard exec ution

Build tools and services

• that help sales and operators understand current and future capacity, operational risks and opportunities for growth
• Solve complex multi-objective optimization problems that maximize collection capacity, balancing various (conflicting) customer constraints, and help define what “optimal” means
• systems of systems: decompose complex problems into well-bounded services with clear interfaces, and reason about how they interact, fail, and scale together
• Distributed systems

Requirements

• We're looking for someone with a solid background in software engineering, ideally with a proven track record of building systems from scratch and solving complex, system-level problems. The ide al candida te can operate independently in a fast-paced environment and challenge requirements.

Bachelor's degree in

• Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
• 2+ years of experience with designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
• Proven track record of operating independently and solving complex problems
• Experience with system design
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, for technical and non-technical audiences
• Earth observation tasking

Preferred

Master’s degree in

• Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
• 5+ years of experience designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
• Proficiency with Django/GraphQL stacks

Hands-on experience operating spacecraft

• Experience with C++ / high-performance Python (vectorization, JIT compilation like Numba, GPU parallelization)
• Demonstrated practical experience building high-performance backend software applications and/or libraries
• Integer/linear/multi-objective optimization or other Operations Research style problems
• Back-end/API performance optimization

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.