Job Summary:
Albedo is a pioneering company focused on making Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) mainstream by building the necessary infrastructure for satellite missions. They are seeking a Director of Software to lead the software engineering organization, manage integrated software performance, and collaborate with other directors to elevate software's role within the system.
Responsibilities:
โข Lead the software engineering organization โ FSW, GNC, applied AI, ground โ across approximately three to four teams of managers and ICs
โข Own the integrated software performance of the satellite: deterministic flight software, control law implementation and verification, on-orbit and on-ground AI, and the command-and-control path
โข Manage the simulation and HIL infrastructure that scales across the program and stays honestly flight-like
โข Lead the closure of the GNC analytical-to-flight loop so that anomalies trace cleanly to model gaps or implementation bugs without ambiguity
โข Develop technical leaders in each software domain (including domains outside your strongest) and resist the gravity to over-invest in your home discipline
โข Defend the boundary between flight software and ground tooling, and the boundary between software and hardware, against drift
โข Partner with the Director of Hardware, Systems Engineering, and Program Management to make software a peer of hardware in the system
Qualifications:
Required:
โข Twelve-plus years in real-time embedded, GNC, or flight software, with at least four leading software engineering managers
โข Deep fluency in deterministic flight or flight-like software: timing, scheduling, fault containment, C++ on RTOS
โข GNC literacy at the leadership level - you cannot derive every Kalman variant from scratch, but you can engage substantively with control law structure, estimator behavior, actuator interaction, and their failure modes, and you have done so in your own career
โข Track record of building simulation and HIL infrastructure that caught real bugs before flight, and post-mortem discipline that changed the pipeline when bugs survived
โข Experience leading heterogeneous software teams across domains you did not personally come up through
โข Real opinions on the HW/SW boundary, on-orbit vs ground compute split, and where abstractions earn their keep
โข US CITIZENSHIP IS REQUIRED
Company:
Full-stack VLEO systems. Clarity-1 is flying in VLEO today. Founded in 2020, the company is headquartered in Broomfield, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.