Flight & Onboard Software
Flight software runs the spacecraft’s brain – boot, fault management, command execution. We place engineers who write code that has to work the first time, every time, with no patch cycle in orbit.
What Flight Software engineers actually do.
Flight software engineers write and verify the onboard software that runs a spacecraft’s computer – everything from boot and fault management to command execution and payload operations. It’s safety- and mission-critical code, built to strict coding standards and verified far beyond typical commercial software.
On autonomous and constellation programmes, flight software increasingly overlaps with onboard autonomy and fault management – engineers who can move between embedded systems and higher-level decision logic are especially valuable.
Why this hire is hard.
- Requires real-time, embedded and safety-critical software experience together — narrower than general embedded work
- Formal verification, static analysis and coding standards experience is uncommon outside aerospace/defence
- Must be comfortable in resource-constrained environments – limited memory, radiation-hardened processors
- Genuinely flight-proven code on a CV is rare and highly valued
- Competing for the same senior candidates as a small number of primes and new-space companies
Roles, technologies and seniority we cover
Roles we cover
Flight Software Engineer, Embedded Software Engineer (flight), Software V&V Engineer, Fault Management Engineer, Flight Software Lead, Principal Flight Software Engineer.
Technologies & competencies
C/C++ (safety-critical subsets), RTOS (VxWorks, RTEMS, FreeRTOS), fault detection/isolation/recovery (FDIR), static analysis tools, unit/integration testing frameworks, configuration management for flight builds, radiation-tolerant processor architectures.
Seniority levels
Graduate through Senior, Principal, Flight Software Lead and Head of Flight Software.
Typical candidate profiles
Computer science, software or electronic engineering backgrounds; experience in aerospace, defence, automotive safety-critical, or medical-device embedded software often transfers well; genuine flight heritage is the strongest differentiator.
Relevant industries
Satellite manufacturers, launch providers, human spaceflight, defence primes, new-space constellations.
Related disciplines & insights
GNC / AOCS
The algorithms that flight software actually runs.
Embedded Engineering
The hardware-adjacent layer flight software sits on top of.
What makes a flight-software engineer mission-ready
The competencies that separate strong software engineers from flight-critical ones.