Onboard Software Engineer - Peripheral Services

Wanna join the adventure? Loft's AI for Space group is building the stack that runs real machine learning in orbit; turning raw sensor data into decisions on the satellite itself, so insight reaches the customer in minutes instead of hours. The AI Engineering team is where models meet the spacecraft. We own the full path from a partner's trained model to something that actually runs — fast — on flight hardware: compiling ONNX models into optimized engines for each accelerator, the Space Inference Engine and its execution providers, the SDK that packages models for flight, and the perf tooling that proves a model fits its power, thermal, and latency budget before it ever leaves the ground. As we open the platform to a growing roster of defense and Earth-observation partners, the team's scope and the range of silicon we target are expanding fast. As our ML Runtime Engineer, you'll own model compilation and the performance tooling behind it. We're looking for someone scrappy — the kind of engineer who takes an unfamiliar model and an unforgiving power budget, digs into the graph, and gets it running on real hardware without waiting for the path to be handed to them. You'll move between model compilation, runtime internals, quantization, and hardware-in-the-loop CI, sometimes in the same afternoon. About this role:

• Design, implement, and refine software with a high degree of ownership, driving impactful features from concept through delivery while ensuring robustness and reliability.
• Review code, provide clear feedback, and enforce adherence to established development processes, style guides, and design standards to maintain consistency and quality across the codebase.
• Design and implement unit and integration tests for both self-authored and peer-authored code.
• Utilize version control systems to create feature branches, push code, and merge approved code into production branches.
• Contribute to the onboard software architecture through design proposals and collaborative review
• Participate in the review and enhancement of software development processes and design standards.
• Coordinate with downstream teams on the distribution and adoption of the latest releases.
• In addition to responsibilities within onboard software, you’ll have the opportunity to directly be involved in operating our on-orbit fleet of satellites.

Must Haves:

• 3+ years' software engineering experience, using programming languages including C/C++ (C++11 or newer) and Python.
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows
• Experience with continuous integration tools (GitLab-CI, Jenkins, or similar).
• Knowledge of build systems (e.g., Make, CMake).
• Understanding of distributed architecture.
• Familiarity with networking protocols (e.g., UDP, TCP, IP) and POSIX standards.
• Experience in developing multi-threaded applications.
• Previous team leader or manager role

Nice to Haves:

• Familiarity with additional programming languages, such as Go or Rust.
• Experience with embedded Linux operation, including Yocto, device trees, systemd, and Linux on ARM platforms.
• Proficiency with unit test frameworks (e.g., pytest, Googletest, Unity)
• Experience with middleware framework (gRPC, ZMQ/NATS, etc.)
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker, K3S, systemd-nspawn)
• Experience with space systems and concepts

Some of Our Awesome Benefits:

Equity, we want you to have an active role in our success

Up to 35 days of Paid Time Off (vacations & RTT ) and flexible working hours, we want you to be at your best

Health and life insurance, we care about your health

Lunch Vouchers, because let’s be honest, we love food! (we even have a slack channel about it #loft-gourmand)

Cross-office travel opportunities between San Francisco, Colorado, and Toulouse to learn from our differences

Company and team off-sites and many other events to work & celebrate together

Relocation assistance to Toulouse when applicable

*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.