Senior Software Engineer (Space Communications)

About Northwood:

Northwood is on a mission to transform connectivity between Earth and space, bringing the benefits of space to the masses through innovations in space communications technologies. If you're passionate about building quickly and seeing your work deployed globally with real impact, we want you at Northwood.

Role:

As a Software Engineer at Northwood, you will be pivotal in designing, implementing, and optimizing the global service that delivers connectivity to our customers. You will have ownership over key areas - ranging from control of our antenna systems to the customer APIs that enable booking time on our network. An ideal candidate is someone who likes to work across areas of responsibility and can dive deep into high priority challenges.

Northwood is a full-stack company, with software development spanning everything from embedded systems and high speed networking to distributed web services. We seek versatile candidates who want to contribute across multiple areas while having a solid foundation in a few core areas of focus. Key areas of focus include—but are not limited to—the following (new team members will have the opportunity to work across these areas):

• Cloud orchestration & distributed systems design

  • Lead the end-to-end architecture of a global, distributed control plane that schedules hundreds of satellite passes per hour across mixed AWS/on-prem nodes

  • Mentor teams on fault-tolerant patterns and land design RFCs that become Northwood standards

• API, database & front end development

  • Build and own customer-facing and internal control-plane APIs – craft, version, and operate the endpoints that let users search, reserve, update, and cancel satellite passes at multi-thousand-request scale

  • Design and implement the underlying workflow-orchestrator that coordinates satellite communications across sites, reconciles conflicts, and enables autonomous coordination across the worlds largest ground network

  • Architect the real-time TT&C / data-transfer interfaces – deliver a secure, bidirectional streaming channel that carries command uplink, telemetry downlink, and supports near-real-time data delivery across Northwood’s global ground network.

• Edge systems (ground station)

  • Design and implement control systems for our ground station hardware, you will write software that interacts with everything from embedded systems to RF modems

• High bandwidth data movement

  • Architect and optimize data pipelines for efficient movement of data between ground stations and various end environments

  • Architect a Tbps-class SD-WAN overlay (WireGuard + QUIC) that transparently shifts traffic between sites, S3-compatible buckets and customer VPCs, with per-flow QoS and FEC.

• Monitoring & alerting systems

  • Create comprehensive monitoring and alerting solutions for software and infrastructure

  • Implement tools to ensure continuous uptime and rapid issue resolution

• Global telemetry capabilities 

  • Transform our telemetry data into actionable insights, enabling predictive diagnostics to address issues before they arise; keep our customers informed about relevant operations in real time

• Infrastructure, security & pipelines

  • A global network requires global deployments, and Northwood is committed to building a secure, reliable, and stable pipeline. This infrastructure empowers our developers to deploy changes continuously—without the risk of disrupting the system or relying on 'testing in prod.'

• Production line software & testing

  • Develop software for production line bring-up and testing

  • Automate testing procedures to ensure hardware and software reliability

  • Working alongside mechanical/RF/EE/FPGA and SW engineers to ensure system correctness, performance, and reliability before leaving our manufacturing line

• Simulation & orchestration software

  • Create simulations that model satellite and network design

  • Create simulation tools for testing and validating system performance 

  • Design and implement software that orchestrates our global antenna network and data plane 

Basic Qualifications:

• 5-7+ years of professional software development experience (this doesn’t have to be from a ful