Software Engineer, Lodestar

• We are hiring this role at mid-senior level. 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
• 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
• Candidates should have strong expertise in any or all orbital dynamic simulation, 3D game engines, or distributed simulation architecture (ROS2)

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