Staff Embedded Software Designer

Our mission is to provide real-time on-orbit connectivity for critical missions, enabling a new era of data-driven intelligence and innovation. With 33 satellites launched to date, Kepler operates the first commercial optical data relay constellation, enabling real-time, continuous space communications while supporting advanced on-orbit compute and hosted payload capabilities. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain reliable, high-quality embedded software for both spacecraft and ground-based systems supporting a growing fleet of satellites 

• Linux networking infrastructure, including routing, control-plane, and dataplane integration  

• Developing software for FPGA-based platforms, including bring-up, driver integration, and optimization of memory-mapped interfaces between processing cores and custom IP. 

• Develop automated tests, validation tools, and technical documentation to support robust software delivery and long-term maintainability 

• Participate in software architecture discussions, design reviews, and code reviews to ensure software quality and system reliability 

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to define system requirements, debug complex issues, and evolve system architecture 

• Identify performance gaps, reliability risks, and architectural shortcomings in existing systems, and drive improvements across the software stack 

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to junior engineers while contributing to engineering best practices and development standards 

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• 8+ years of embedded software development experience  

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience  

• Strong proficiency in C and modern C++  

• Experience developing software for embedded Linux environments  

• Experience working close to operating system internals, including concurrency, IPC, synchronization, memory management, and hardware/software interfaces  

• Experience integrating and debugging complex software systems across multiple abstraction layers  

• Experience with embedded build systems and toolchains such as Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot, CMake, or similar  

• Ability to debug and optimize software in resource-constrained or performance-sensitive environments  

• Strong communication and collaboration skills in cross-functional engineering environments  

• Ability to work effectively across distributed teams and time zones 

Bonus Points:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field 

• Experience developing software for aerospace applications 

• Experience implementing embedded security solutions such as secure boot, hardware security modules (HSMs), certificate/key management, authentication, or encrypted communications 

• Familiarity with Linux networking concepts and infrastructure, including routing, interfaces, netlink, or packet-processing pipelines 

• Experience developing multi-stage bootloaders 

• Strong knowledge of computer networking and modern networking protocols 

• Experience with RTL (Verilog and/or VHDL) and embedded SoCs