Director of Embedded Software & FPGA Engineering

Wanna join the adventure?

Loft Orbital is making space simple, giving commercial, defense, and government customers fast, reliable access to orbit through a standardized satellite platform. Our Hub and Cockpit products cut the complexity of traditional satellite missions, reducing time-to-orbit from years to months as we build a growing, heterogeneous fleet in LEO with increasing onboard AI and compute.

As Director, Embedded Systems & FPGA Engineering, you will shape the technical foundations that determine how Loft’s hardware, embedded software, onboard software, and operational systems work together. This is an opportunity to define the abstraction layers and engineering interfaces that let teams move faster without sacrificing robustness, reliability, or system understanding. You will help create a platform that can evolve across processors, FPGAs, operating systems, hypervisors, RISC-V, Rust, and future technologies without forcing unnecessary changes through every layer of the stack.

You will lead experienced engineers who work at the intersection of hardware, firmware, software, systems, and operations. The role is hands-on in the technical sense: you will not write production code every day, but you should be comfortable going deep into architecture, Linux and build environments, debugging, security boundaries, integration problems, and technical trade-offs alongside the team.

About this role:

Must Haves:

Nice to Haves:

• Experience with spacecraft avionics, command and data handling (C&DH), payload interfaces, or satellite flight systems.
• Experience in New Space or satellite manufacturing, particularly standardized, modular, or repeatable satellite platforms.
• Experience with radiation-tolerant or radiation-hardened design and an understanding of the space environment.
• Experience with real-time operating systems such as RTEMS, FreeRTOS, or VxWorks.
• Experience with high-speed interfaces such as Ethernet, SpaceWire, SpaceFibre, CAN, PCIe, USB, or MIL-STD-1553.
• Experience with ARM-based embedded systems, U-Boot, ARM Trusted Firmware, device-tree overlays, or secure boot implementation.
• Experience contributing to upstream Linux or maintaining kernel modules, platform drivers, or low-level middleware.
• Experience with hypervisor isolation, virtualized I/O, partitioning, or mixed-criticality system design.
• Experience using RISC-V or Rust in production, platform, tooling, or security-sensitive environments.
• Exposure to onboard AI/ML compute or edge-processing hardware.
• Experience supporting government or defense programs with formal assurance, security, sovereignty, and documentation requirements.

Some of Our Awesome Benefits:

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Research shows that while men apply to jobs where they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other underrepresented people tend to only apply when they meet 100% of the qualifications. At Loft, we value respectful debate and people who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions.  We strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t check all the boxes.

Who We Are

Loft: Space Made Simple.

Founded in 2017, Loft provides governments, companies, and research institutions with a fast, reliable, and simple way to deploy missions in orbit.

We integrate, launch, and operate spacecraft, offering end-to-end missions as a service across Earth observation, IoT connectivity, on-orbit AI, national security missions, and more. Leveraging our existing space infrastructure and an extensive inventory of satellite buses, Loft is reducing years-long integration and launch timelines to months. With more than 30 missions flown, Loft’s flight heritage and proven technologies enable customers to focus on their mission objectives.

With a growing fleet on track to reach 30 satellites by 2027, we are scaling up quickly across our offices in San Francisco, CA | Golden, CO | and Toulouse, France to meet accelerating demand for space infrastructure.

As an international company your resume will be reviewed by people across our offices so please attach a copy in English.

Compensation: USD 195,000 – 275,000 per year salary