Director of Software Engineering

About the Role

Albedo is building software for satellites that fly in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO). As Director of Software Engineering, you'll lead the teams developing our flight software, GNC, ground systems, and applied AI, and ensure our missions meet their autonomy and performance objectives. This role will ensure long-term growth and adaptation as the pace of software and autonomy accelerates for VLEO and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Lead the software engineering organization — FSW, GNC, applied AI, ground — across approximately three to four teams of managers and ICs
• 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
• Manage the simulation and HIL infrastructure that scales across the program and stays honestly flight-like
• Lead the closure of the GNC analytical-to-flight loop so that anomalies trace cleanly to model gaps or implementation bugs without ambiguity
• Develop technical leaders in each software domain (including domains outside your strongest) and resist the gravity to over-invest in your home discipline
• Defend the boundary between flight software and ground tooling, and the boundary between software and hardware, against drift
• Partner with the Director of Hardware, Systems Engineering, and Program Management to make software a peer of hardware in the system

Requirements

• Twelve-plus years in real-time embedded, GNC, or flight software, with at least four leading software engineering managers
• Deep fluency in deterministic flight or flight-like software: timing, scheduling, fault containment, C++ on RTOS
• 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
• 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
• Experience leading heterogeneous software teams across domains you did not personally come up through
• Real opinions on the HW/SW boundary, on-orbit vs ground compute split, and where abstractions earn their keep
• In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire
• All persons hired will be required to be a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident of the U.S., or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State
• Applicants must be a U.S. Person as defined under 22 CFR 120.62

Benefits

• Employee friendly equity compensation
• 4% direct matching 401k
• Health Insurance: 100% employee coverage & 75% dependent coverage
• Parental leave and childcare coverage
• Flexible vacation and sick time from day one
• 12 company holidays
• $100 monthly wellness benefit
• Relocation package if not based in Denver

Pay

Salary Range $234,323 - $269,600 per year

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 Albedo, we'd rather hear from you. We care more about how you think than which boxes you check. We value people who do the math, make their assumptions explicit, and ask the annoying questions: what breaks, what's the failure mode, what has to be true for this to work? If that sounds like you, apply, even if you don't meet every line.