Principal Software Engineer (Contract) - Flight SW & Systems Modeling

We’re ALTEN Technology USA, an engineering company helping clients bring groundbreaking ideas to life—from advancing space exploration and life-saving medical devices to building autonomous electric vehicles. With 3,000+ experts across North America, we partner with leading companies in aerospace, medical devices, robotics, automotive, commercial vehicles, EVs, rail, and more.

As part of the global ALTEN Group—57,000+ engineers in 30 countries—we deliver across the entire product development cycle, from consulting to full project outsourcing.

When you join ALTEN Technology USA, you’ll collaborate on some of the world’s toughest engineering challenges, supported by mentorship, career growth opportunities, and comprehensive benefits. We take pride in fostering a culture where employees feel valued, supported, and inspired to grow.

As Principal Software Engineer (Contract) - Flight SW & Systems Modeling you will be responsible for;

 

The Software Engineer's primary responsibility will be contributing to the development of U.S. Customer's satellite flight software. This engineer will be involved in the full lifecycle of flight software development, from requirements definition through operations. However, because we are a small team where each person takes on many roles, this engineer will also contribute to mission concept development, in-house modeling and simulation capabilities, and proposal writing. Being at the cutting edge of space technology, we need someone who is eager to learn, grow, and take on new and potentially unfamiliar challenges. There is no shortage of fascinating problems to solve.

The Principal Software Engineer (Contractor) will lead and perform moderate and complex assignments, including providing guidance to junior Software Engineers. The Principal Software Engineer will have project and subject matter responsibility and authority.

Flight Software - 75%

• Upgrade existing flight software for new missions
• Contribute to the development of new satellite flight software for U.S. satellite platforms
• Develop in-house tools to analyze flight software performance and assess its compatibility with new mission and conops
• Develop and execute flight software tests at the unit, module, subsystem, and platform level
• Work with manufacturing engineers to support installation onto the hardware-in-the-loop test environment and eventual flight hardware
• Participate in anomaly resolution activities and patch existing flight software

Systems Modeling - 15%

• Contribute to the development of systems- and mission-level modeling and simulation tools
• Develop software models of payloads for ground testing
• Support development of software model of satellite platform, particularly ensuring accurate representation of the flight software

Additional Responsibilities - 10%

• Support working groups, both internal and with customers and/or vendors
• Support proposal writing, new business
• Assess the software impacts of new hardware, conops, and missions

 

Qualifications;

 

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Math) or related scientific areas.
• Preferred: Master's in STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Math) or related scientific areas.

Experience:

• A minimum of 15 years with a Bachelor's degree, or 12 years with a Master's degree
• Proven track-record of working with space hardware and/or flight software systems, starting from conceptual designs and tradeoffs through detailed design, development, manufacture, integration, test, deployment, and operations.

Knowledge, Skills, Demonstrated Capabilities:

• Insatiable curiosity and a demonstrated ability to learn and work independently
• Proficiency in C/C++
• Expertise in one or more of the following:
  • Embedded software development (ARM 7 preferred)
  • BSP development
  • Device driver development and software/hardware interfaces (Ethernet/CAN/SpaceWire RMAP/1553/RS-422 preferred)
  • New board bring up
  • Real-time operating systems programming, debugging, and testing (RTEMS and/or PetaLinux preferred)
  • Cybersecurity for Space Systems
  • GNC algorithms design, analysis, testing, and implementation
  • Functional validation of embedded software on HITL and/or SITL test beds
  • Software safety assurance
  • Network topology and configuration
  • Simulators: numerical, emulator, and hardware in the loop
  • Software requirements and configuration management

Travel Required:

• Periodic t