Senior Software Engineer, LeoLabs

• M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 6+ years experience with Python in a SaaS platform
• Experience designing, building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines
• Experience with architecting and scaling full stack or distributed backend systems
• Experience with AWS
• Experience with cloud deployment technologies, such as Kubernetes, Docker containers
• Experience with relational databases
• Deep understanding of good software development practices, agile practices, security, documentation and observability
• Experience with event-driven architectures and message queuing systems
• Ability to work on-call outside of normal business hours during critical escalations
• Experience in agile and test-driven development methodologies
• Able to hold a USA security clearance

Desirable

• LeoLabs is seeking a talented individual to join our Catalog team as a Senior Software Engineer
• The Catalog team's charter is to build and maintain the world’s best independent catalog of objects in low Earth orbit using sensor data from LeoLabs and our partners
• We deploy software to public cloud environments and other operational environments, ensuring high availability, scalability, and security across our infrastructure
• We also focus on optimizing our data pipeline across multiple areas, including radar scheduling, measurement association, orbit determination and propagation, and new object discovery
• As a part of our team, you will make significant contributions to both the developer experience and the customer experience for the LeoLabs Platform
• You will explore and incorporate new technologies to help scale the data pipeline, enabling it to support more radar sources and the growing number of objects in space
• Your work will directly contribute to improving space object tracking, space traffic management, and orbital safety—critical components in ensuring the sustainable use of LEO(low earth orbit)
• Within 1 month, you’ll:
• Complete LeoLabs' onboarding program and gain a deep understanding of our business, vision, and team
• Set up your local development environment and become familiar with our engineering stack
• Participate in your first sprint, contributing to small bug fixes or feature improvements
• Shadow a senior engineer and orbit support analyst to understand our data pipeline and system architecture
• Within 3 months, you’ll:
• Take ownership of a small-to-medium feature, from design to implementation
• Improve an aspect of our data pipeline performance (e.g., optimizing a query, reducing processing time for a specific job)
• Conduct your first production deployment, following our CI/CD process
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (e.g., Product, Infrastructure) to understand dependencies and align on priorities
• Provide feedback in code reviews and contribute to team discussions on technical design decisions
• Within 6 months, you’ll:
• Take a leadership role in a key technical initiative, such as scaling our data pipeline to support additional radars and newly launched objects
• Build internal dashboards to monitor data quality and system performance
• Lead an incident response or troubleshooting effort, demonstrating a deep understanding of our system
• Contribute to architectural decisions that enhance system scalability and reliability
• Within 12 months, you’ll:
• Be a domain expert in one or more areas of the system
• Drive a major technical improvement, such as re-architecting a part of our pipeline for better scalability
• Establish best practices and guidelines for software development, security, and system observability
• Present a technical deep dive or post-mortem to the broader engineering team
• Lead cross-team collaborations to improve system interoperability and efficiency
• Have helped shape the software engineering culture at Leolabs

Total funding: $111m

Low earth orbit (LEO) is fertile territory for the new space and satellite startups cropping up all over the world. It offers unrivalled access to lightning fast communications and high quality earth imaging - the only issue is, things are getting crowded up there. This in itself creates an access and safety issue for further developments and exploration, and collisions run the risk of creating even riskier levels of space debris.