Systems Software Engineer - Space Industry

About the role

Simera Sense, a provider of Earth observation camera solutions for the small satellite market, is looking for a Systems Software Engineer in Somerset West, South Africa. You will engineer and qualify secure, production-ready system software for real-time edge platforms, reporting to the Group Systems Engineer Manager.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement system-level software on a real-time OS such as QNX or VxWorks, working close to the OS on processes, threads, memory, filesystems, networking and security.
• Implement device drivers for on-chip, proprietary and standard on-board devices, and develop boot software for a development kit and later for proprietary hardware.
• Secure remote updates of the operating system and proprietary services, and debug and optimise performance, resource usage and reliability.
• Build tools and services that run reliably in production and communicate with a central cloud-based system.
• Design concurrent and parallel software, handling synchronization, race conditions, deadlocks and consistency, and build distributed components that tolerate partial failure, latency and partition.
• Develop software for unreliable, high-latency, intermittent networks, with end-to-end cryptographic security and robust protocols and data pipelines.
• Perform component testing, system testing and system qualification against requirements, and produce test documentation.

Required profile

• Bachelor Honours degree or postgraduate diploma in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering or a closely related field.
• 0-2 years of relevant experience.
• Strong background in system software development, including real-time OS, fault-tolerant unattended systems, distributed systems, multithreaded programming, device drivers, system boot and secure remote update.
• Strong background in edge platforms and in analysing, profiling and debugging systems.

Required skills

• Algorithms, data structures, automata and formal models of computation, concurrency, communication networks and cryptographic security.
• Proficiency in at least two systems or backend languages (e.g. C, Rust, Go).
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals and communication security.
• Experience modelling software with automata.

What we offer

• The opportunity to work in the fast-growing space industry, with a niche global market for optical payloads for microsatellites.
• Cutting-edge technology and a competitive salary.
• A friendly working environment.