SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER, FULL STACK (DATA & VIDEO ANALYSIS)
The Vehicle Analysis Tooling team builds the applications that production, test, and flight depend on. You will own the full path: platforms that ingest and process high-volume engineering data, such as telemetry, sensor data, or video; the tools and interfaces engineers use to review that analysis and act on it; and the infrastructure those applications run on. These systems rarely sit in one specialty. Depth in data, video, or applied models is enough to start. Learning the rest quickly enough to ship it is part of the job.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of full-stack applications and platforms used across production, test, and flight, including data processing that turns telemetry, sensor data, or video into analysis engineers can use and that feeds model inference.
- Work directly with vehicle, propulsion, test, manufacturing, and inspection engineers on their most important analysis problems, and judge success by time saved and problems caught.
- Build the internal tools and web interfaces engineers use to query, visualize, and act on engineering data and on the results of automated analysis.
- Profile and improve performance where engineers feel it: data processing, database queries, and interactive views of large telemetry or video. Set how the team measures that performance and holds it as volume grows.
- Take statistical models, computer vision, or large language models from evaluation into production review workflows for anomaly detection and inspection, and keep the quality of their results visible once they are in production.
- Move prototypes into production with automated tests, CI/CD, and a repeatable release process.
- Set the architecture and the practices the team uses for testing, CI/CD, observability, and code review.
- Own the infrastructure our applications run on, including deployments, monitoring, operations, capacity planning, and reliability.
- Operate the applications in production: respond to failures, restore service, and carry the fix into the software and into how the system is run. Raise the standard for monitoring and incident response as usage grows.
- Move across processing, interfaces, models, and operations, learn unfamiliar parts quickly enough to ship, and help other engineers do the same.
- Mentor other engineers and set technical direction for the software and for how it is operated.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, or another scientific discipline, or 8+ years of professional software experience in lieu of a degree.
- 5+ years of software development experience.
- 3+ years of experience building and operating production applications or data systems, including full-stack development.
- 3+ yearsexperience building production Python systems, including data processing, services, or user-facing application code.
- 1+ leading technical work, including design reviews, project direction, and the quality of the code the team ships.
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Production experience with video platforms and their infrastructure, including ingest, storage, transcoding, playback, and review of high-volume engineering video.
- Strong familiarity with large language model tools and capabilities, including how they work and where they can be used, or experience applying them to computer vision problems in production.
- Experience shipping applied machine learning, statistical models, or computer vision into a system other people depend on, or serving models for inference, including live inference. Relevant tools include PyTorch, OpenCV, Ultralytics or other YOLO-family detectors, and scikit-learn.
- Production experience with the Python data stack (Pandas, NumPy, SciPy) and PostgreSQL.
- Experience with time-series or other signal data, including cleaning, transformation, feature extraction, and analysis, or with taking models from training through deployment and maintenance.
- Experience profiling and optimizing production data systems or interactive applications, including query latency, memory use, throughput, or interactive rendering of large datasets, and keeping those gains as volume grows.
- Experience operating production infrastructure, including Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, HPC systems, a web application framework, CI/CD, batch or job processing, or observability.
- Experience leading incident response and reliability work for multi-service applications, including monitoring and alerting.
- Experience with a second language used for services or applications, such as Go, Rust, or C#.
- Experience leading internal tools that engineers rely on, including projects that span hardware and software teams
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
Pay Range:
Level 3: $165,000.00 - $265,000.00
Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience.
Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package at SpaceX. You may also be eligible for long-term incentives, in the form of company stock or long-term cash awards, as well as potential discretionary bonuses and the ability to purchase additional stock at a discount through an Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You will also receive access to comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, paid parental leave, and various other discounts and perks. You may also accrue 3 weeks of paid vacation and will be eligible for 10 or more paid holidays per year. Employees accrue paid sick leave pursuant to Company policy which satisfies or exceeds the accrual, carryover, and use requirements of the law.
ITAR REQUIREMENTS:
- To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
SpaceX is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with SpaceX is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.
Applicants wishing to view a copy of SpaceX’s Affirmative Action Plan for veterans and individuals with disabilities, or applicants requiring reasonable accommodation to the application/interview process should reach out to EEOCompliance@spacex.com.
