Flight Software Architect

Here at The Exploration Company, we are building spacecrafts for humanity. The Flight Software Architect plays a key role in defining and maintaining the software architecture for our spacecraft flight software. The role ensures that the flight software architecture meets mission needs, system-level requirements, and safety and reliability objectives, while remaining scalable, maintainable, and suitable for the evolving needs of our spacecraft platforms. Working closely with Flight Software, Systems Engineering, Avionics, GNC, Mission Operations, and other functional disciplines, the Flight Software Architect drives architectural decisions, technical consistency, and the integration of software across the spacecraft. Key Responsibilities In your capacity as Flight Software Architect, your role will be continuously evolving, but day to day your duties will include: What we would love to see from you • Software architecture & design — Define, develop, and maintain the overall flight software architecture, including software components, interfaces, data flows, and execution models, ensuring alignment with spacecraft system architecture and mission objectives. • Technical leadership & architectural decisions — Drive key architectural decisions and establish design principles, technical standards, and best practices for flight software development. Provide technical guidance to software engineers and ensure consistency across software components and development activities. • System integration & interfaces — Define and coordinate software interfaces with avionics, onboard computers, sensors, actuators, GNC, communication systems, and other spacecraft subsystems. Ensure robust integration across functional disciplines and support the resolution of cross-system technical challenges. • Requirements & traceability — Translate mission and system-level requirements into software architectural requirements, design constraints, and interface specifications. Ensure traceability between requirements, architecture, implementation, and verification, working closely with Systems Engineering and functional chain owners. • Reliability, safety & performance — Ensure that architectural decisions address fault tolerance, robustness, timing constraints, resource utilization, failure detection and recovery, and overall spacecraft reliability. Contribute to safety analyses, failure management strategies, and the definition of appropriate software verification and validation approaches. • Verification, validation & technical risk management — Identify and mitigate architectural risks, assess technical trade-offs, and support design reviews, integration campaigns, and verification activities. Ensure that the architecture is validated against mission requirements and that critical technical assumptions are verified early in the development lifecycle. • Cross-functional collaboration & technical communication — Act as a technical reference for flight software architecture, facilitating alignment between Flight Software, Systems Engineering, Avionics, GNC, Mission Operations, and external partners, including ESA where applicable. Communicate architectural decisions, constraints, and trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and project stakeholders. In the role of Flight Software Architect, ideally, you will have the following: • 10–15 years of professional experience in software engineering, including substantial experience in flight software, embedded software, or safety- and mission-critical systems. • Proven experience defining and evolving software architectures for complex critical software systems , ideally for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or other aerospace applications. • Strong knowledge of real-time embedded software , operati