Our mission is to provide real-time on-orbit connectivity for critical missions, enabling a new era of data-driven intelligence and innovation. With 33 satellites launched to date, Kepler operates the first commercial optical data relay constellation, enabling real-time, continuous space communications while supporting advanced on-orbit compute and hosted payload capabilities.
Key Responsibilities:
Design, develop, and maintain reliable, high-quality embedded software for both spacecraft and ground-based systems supporting a growing fleet of satellites
Design and implement secure communications capabilities, including encryption, authentication, and key exchange for next-generation data links
Build and maintain low-level software components including device drivers, kernel modules, hardware interfaces, and platform services
Develop automated tests, validation tools, and technical documentation to support robust software delivery and long-term maintainability
Participate in software architecture discussions, design reviews, and code reviews to ensure software quality and system reliability
Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to define system requirements, debug complex issues, and evolve system architecture
Identify performance gaps, reliability risks, and architectural shortcomings in existing systems, and drive improvements across the software stack
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to junior engineers while contributing to engineering best practices and development standards
Required Skills & Qualifications:
6+ years of experience developing embedded software for complex, high-reliability systems
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, debugging, testing, performance analysis, and maintainable code development
Proficiency in C/C++ for embedded systems, including concurrency, interrupt handling, memory-mapped peripherals, and hardware communication interfaces such as SPI, I2C, UART, and CAN
Experience developing software for embedded Linux and/or RTOS environments, including familiarity with build systems such as Yocto/OpenEmbedded and operating systems such as FreeRTOS
Experience developing low-level embedded Linux components including kernel modules, device drivers, and device tree integrations
Experience developing and maintaining automated test frameworks, validation tooling, or hardware/software integration test environments
Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across software, hardware, and operations teams
Proficiency with modern software development workflows and tools, including Git-based version control and code review practices
Bonus Points:
Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
Experience developing software for aerospace applications
Experience implementing embedded security solutions such as secure boot, hardware security modules (HSMs), certificate/key management, authentication, or encrypted communications
Familiarity with Linux networking concepts and infrastructure, including routing, interfaces, netlink, or packet-processing pipelines
Experience developing multi-stage bootloaders
Strong knowledge of computer networking and modern networking protocols
Experience with RTL (Verilog and/or VHDL) and embedded SoCs
