Senior Embedded Software Designer (6+ month Contract)

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
• Demonstrates a willingness to adopt and effectively utilize AI-assisted engineering tools, applying sound judgment to improve productivity, quality, and innovation while continuously adapting to evolving technologies
• Demonstrates a willingness to adopt and effectively utilize AI-assisted engineering tools, applying sound judgment to improve productivity, quality, and innovation while continuously adapting to evolving technologies

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