Flight Software Engineer

About the Company

Cowboy Space Corp. is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our satellites operate in Low Earth Orbit to collect sunlight and enable a new class of capabilities—from powering on-orbit compute, to transmitting energy via infrared lasers. Founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt (co-founder of Robinhood), we are building a new category of space infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical lead and owner for payload flight software, from architecture through on-orbit operations
• Design, develop, and test flight software in Rust for attitude and pointing state machines, command handling, and telemetry/data storage
• Define the software architecture, coding patterns, and conventions adopted across the flight software team
• Establish and uphold the bar for flight-quality software: determinism, fault tolerance, testability, and safe behavior under failure
• Design and implement fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) behaviors at the software level
• Build and maintain automated test infrastructure, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing
• Collaborate closely with GNC, avionics, electrical, and systems engineers to define interfaces and system behavior
• Support spacecraft integration, environmental test campaigns, and launch and early-orbit operations
• Investigate anomalies across hardware/software boundaries and perform root cause analysis
• Mentor engineers on the team and review designs and code

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience developing flight software or software for high-reliability, safety-critical systems
• Experience with software that has flown on orbit or equivalent deployment experience
• Strong systems programming skills in Rust, C, or C++
• Experience with real-time and embedded systems, including resource-constrained and fault-tolerant designs
• Experience designing and implementing state machines, command/telemetry handling, or similar spacecraft software functions
• Experience with hardware/software integration and testing on real hardware
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically, setting architecture and mentoring engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Aerospace Engineering
• Prior experience as a technical lead or architect for a spacecraft flight software effort
• Production Rust experience, particularly in embedded or systems contexts
• Experience with attitude determination and control or pointing systems
• Experience with FDIR design, redundancy management, and autonomous fault response
• Experience building simulation, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop test environments
• Familiarity with radiation effects and space-environment considerations