Capella is at the forefront of making vital information about our world accessible in a timely manner. We’re leveraging proven technologies and building new capabilities to create a constellation of SAR satellites that can collect information about any spot on the planet within an hour. At Capella you’ll work in a collaborative team environment, alongside smart people with a history of space mission success. No prior space experience is needed—we’re looking for people excited about tackling seemingly impossible challenges, learning new skills and concepts, and helping each other achieve success. Our mission and our products are meant to understand the whole world and help everyone in it, regardless of race, creed, or any other distinction. We believe in a diverse and inclusive workplace, and we encourage all people to join our team and bring their unique perspective to help make us stronger.We value diversity at Capella and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position, but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

About the Team

The Platform Engineering team is responsible for building, maintaining, and improving the software, infrastructure, and systems that operate the Capella constellation. We prepare for satellite launches, maintain spacecraft on-orbit, and develop new capabilities to improve how customers can collect and access Earth imagery. The team’s focus is on software and system engineering, maintaining and improve a fully-autonomous, rapid-response spacecraft operations system.

As a senior leader on the Platform Engineering team, you will be interacting on a daily basis with other team leads, software engineers, spacecraft operators, satellite engineers, and data product engineers to develop, maintain, and improve the system. You will have a demonstrable track record of working with complex systems, understanding distributed systems architecture, and setting the engineering development plan and roadmap for making complex technologies easy to use.

All members of the team participate in the on-call rotation that responds to issues/outages/anomalies so that we provide reliable performance our customers can depend on.

About the Role

As Director of Software Engineering in the Platform Engineering team you will define, grow, and guide the teams responsible for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the applications that run our constellations. All of our system components are python services running in AWS, with various underlying infrastructure.

These systems are responsible for command and telemetry handling, mission automation, system monitoring and alerting, ground station integration, satellite operator tools and interfaces, tasking & scheduling, data processing & dissemination, and common software infrastructure. Day-to-day responsibilities include working with internal and external stakeholders to define roadmap and set prioritization for tasks, planning team growth and help with recruiting, and providing key technical vision and expertise in the areas of software architecture and engineering. You will help set broad direction and strategy, establishing practices to ensure the quality and performance of the system is maintained and customer needs are met.

We’re searching for an empathetic leader who values diversity, fairness, and has a proven ability to create and grow high-performing and happy teams.

The position is available in San Francisco, CA, or Louisville, CO

Ideal Qualifications:

• Past leadership experience mentoring and growing software engineering teams.
• Experience maintaining an engineering roadmap and leading prioritization of efforts across multiple projects.
• Excellent communications skills, ability to work collaboratively in a team environment, and enjoyment of learning from and teaching other teams new skills.
• Excellent foundations of software architecture, interface design, distributed systems, and testing patterns.
• Experience building and maintaining highly reliable software systems employing best practices in logging, monitoring, alerting, and reporting.
• Experience with modern Python & AWS best practices (all our components are Python in AWS).
• Experience with (having rolled up your sleeves or having worked alongside) DevOps, distributed system testing, CI/CD systems, release management, and site reliability engineering.

In addition to an opportunity to take part in an innovative and fast-growing business with a highly motivated and skilled team, we also take pride in taking care of our employees. Here are just a few ways that we show our appreciation: