Software Engineer, Lodestar

• We are hiring this role at three levels. All levels require a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Aerospace, Robotics, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience
• Candidates should have strong expertise in any or all orbital dynamic simulation, 3D game engines, or distributed simulation architecture (ROS2)
• Software Engineer I:
• 0–2 years of professional experience in simulation, robotics, games. Can also include Internships and research placements
• Working proficiency in C++ and Python
• Exposure to ROS 2 in an academic, research, or professional setting
• Understanding of multithreading fundamentals - threads, synchronization primitives, race conditions
• Familiarity with 3D game engines (Unreal Engine or Unity) or comparable physics and graphics simulation tooling
• Comfortable developing in Linux and with containerised workflows (Docker)
• Software Engineer II:
• 2–5 years of industry experience building simulation, robotics, or games
• Strong modern C++ (C++17 or later) alongside Python
• Production experience with ROS 2 - node design, DDS middleware, message passing, launch and configuration management
• Hands-on SIL and/or HIL experience: building test harnesses and integrating real vehicle or flight software against simulated sensors and actuators
• Experience with Unreal Engine for sensor or environment simulation, or equivalent depth in Unity, Isaac Sim, or Gazebo
• Experience designing distributed services - inter-process communication, message transport, and orchestration across multiple machines
• Demonstrated multithreaded and concurrent programming in a real-time or soft-real-time context
• Software Engineer III:
• 6+ years of industry experience, including end-to-end ownership of a simulation stack or a major simulation subsystem
• Track record architecting simulation infrastructure - deciding what to model at what fidelity, and defending those trade-offs to engineering stakeholders
• Depth in real-time distributed system design: determinism, time synchronisation, clock management, and reproducibility across nodes
• Experience standing up HIL benches or SIL pipelines from scratch, including CI integration and automated regression testing
• Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction across team boundaries
• Comfortable deriving requirements from first principles
• To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State

Desirable

• Our flagship product MITHRIL is the critical hardware & software necessary to augment any off-the-shelf spacecraft with the ability to autonomously detect, characterise, and reversibly neutralise orbital threats. By building on the proven space heritage of our best-in-class satellite-bus partners and fully integrating MITHRIL as a single platform, we deliver a fully autonomous end-to-end protection spacecraft service
• At Lodestar, as a Software Engineer: Simulation, you'll build the environment in which MITHRIL is developed, tested and proven. Every autonomy behaviour we fly is validated in simulation first, which makes the simulator one of the highest-leverage pieces of software in the company: if it isn't faithful, nothing downstream can be trusted
• You'll develop high-fidelity sensor and environment models in Unreal Engine, stand up the software- and hardware-in-the-loop benches that our flight software runs against, and design the distributed services that let scenarios run reproducibly across machines and in CI
• You'll work directly with the perception, prediction, decision, and missions teams to decide what needs simulating, at what fidelity, and why
• We proudly have an "extreme ownership" oriented engineering culture
• Build and extend the mission simulation environment that Lodestar's autonomy stack is developed and validated against
• Develop high-fidelity sensor and environment models - electro-optical cameras, orbital lighting and illumination
• Build software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop test benches so that flight software can be trialed against realistic simulated missions
• Design distributed simulation services to run mission scenarios at scale
• Own the internal simulation tooling, telemetry, and regression frameworks