Senior Software Engineer

About Us

LeoLabs enables military space commands, civil government agencies, and commercial operators to confidently detect, track, characterize, and respond to threats in space. Our proliferated, multi-mission radar network, real-time orbital data catalog, and AI-powered analytics support secure, safe, and dynamic space operations.

At LeoLabs, our core values of Innovation, Integrity, and Impact guide everything we do. We foster an environment where bold ideas are encouraged, doing the right thing is fundamental, and our work makes a meaningful difference in safeguarding space and our way of life on Earth. As part of our team, you’ll contribute to building the world’s most comprehensive living map of orbital activity, designed to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our era. Together, we are preserving the U.S. and Allied advantage in space, driving the growth of the global economy, and enabling the future of space exploration and innovation.

The Opportunity  

LeoLabs is seeking a talented individual to join our Catalog team as a Senior Software Engineer. The Catalog team's charter is to build and maintain the world’s best independent catalog of objects in low Earth orbit using sensor data from LeoLabs and our partners. We deploy software to public cloud environments and other operational environments, ensuring high availability, scalability, and security across our infrastructure. We also focus on optimizing our data pipeline across multiple areas, including radar scheduling, measurement association, orbit determination and propagation, and new object discovery.  

As a part of our team, you will make significant contributions to both the developer experience and the customer experience for the LeoLabs Platform. You will explore and incorporate new technologies to help scale the data pipeline, enabling it to support more radar sources and the growing number of objects in space. Your work will directly contribute to improving space object tracking, space traffic management, and orbital safety—critical components in ensuring the sustainable use of LEO(low earth orbit). 

Qualifications 

• M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience 

• 6+ years experience with Python in a SaaS platform 

• Experience designing, building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines 

• Experience with architecting and scaling full stack or distributed backend systems 

• Experience with AWS 

• Experience with cloud deployment technologies, such as Kubernetes, Docker containers 

• Experience with relational databases 

• Deep understanding of good software development practices, agile practices, security, documentation and observability 

• Experience with event-driven architectures and message queuing systems 

• Ability to work on-call outside of normal business hours during critical escalations 

• Experience in agile and test-driven development methodologies 

• Able to hold a USA security clearance 

Preferred qualifications 

• Experience deploying to secure environments. 

• Hold an active security clearance 

• Experience working with RESTful web services 

• Working experience with Kafka 

• Working experience with Postgres 

• Experience developing and maintaining microservices-based architectures 

• Familiarity with Math, Physics, or Orbital Mechanics 

Within 1 month, you’ll: 

•Complete LeoLabs' onboarding program and gain a deep understanding of our business, vision, and team

•Set up your local development environment and become familiar with our engineering stack

•Participate in your first sprint, contributing to small bug fixes or feature improvements

•Shadow a senior engineer and orbit support analyst to understand our data pipeline and system architecture

Within 3 months, you’ll: 

•Take ownership of a small-to-medium feature, from design to implementation

•Improve an aspect of our data pipeline performance (e.g., optimizing a query, reducing processing time for a specific job)

•Conduct your first production deployment, following our CI/CD process

•Collaborate with cross-functional teams (e.g., Product, Infrastructure) to understand dependencies and align on priorities

•Provide feedback in code reviews and contribute to team discussions on technical design decisions

Within 6 months, you’ll: 

•Take a leadership role in a key technical initiative, such as scaling our data pipeline to support additional radars and newly launched objects

•Build internal dashboards to monitor data quality and system performance

•Lead an incident response or troubleshooting effort, demonstrating a deep understanding of our system

•Contribute to architectural decisions that enhance system scalability and reliability 

Within 12 months, you’ll: 

•Be a domain expert in one or more areas of the system  

•Drive a major technical improvement, such as re-architecting a part of our pipeline for better scalability

•Establish best practices and guidelines for software development, security, and system observability

•Present a technical deep dive or post-mortem to the broader engineering team

•Lead cross-team collaborations to improve system interoperability and efficiency

•Have helped shape the software engineering culture at Leolabs 

Salary offers are based on a combination of factors, including, but not limited to, experience, skills, and location. The base salary range for this position $145,000 - 179,000 

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.

ITAR REQUIREMENTS

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. More information regarding ITAR can be found at DDTC’s website