Advanced Reentry Technologies
Who We Are:
Inversion is an aerospace and defense company pioneering advanced reentry technology to enable next-generation capabilities from space. By combining high-performance materials, precision aerodynamics, and mission-driven autonomy, Inversion is transforming reentry into an operational capability for an entirely new class of missions.
The company’s highly maneuverable reentry spacecraft, Arc, is designed for rapid global cargo delivery, hypersonic testing, and other national security missions that require precise, controlled flight through the atmosphere. Arc creates an entirely new transportation domain, unlocking unprecedented speed and global reach.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, Inversion designs, manufactures, and integrates its spacecraft under one roof, enabling the company to move rapidly from concept to flight. The company is backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, with customers across the U.S. government and commercial space industry.
Position Overview:
As an Embedded Software Engineer II at Inversion you will develop the software that powers and controls Inversion’s hypersonic reentry vehicle. You will work across the full software stack, from low-level hardware interfaces and board support packages to real-time vehicle control, networking, and mission-critical flight applications.
You will partner closely with electrical, systems, GNC, and integration engineers to bring up new hardware, develop flight software architectures, and deliver reliable software capable of operating through all phases of flight. This role requires strong ownership, hands-on debugging skills, and the ability to rapidly solve challenging hardware-software integration problems.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, develop, test, and maintain embedded software for flight computers, avionics subsystems, payload interfaces, and vehicle control systems.
- Develop high-reliability software in C and C++ for real-time embedded systems operating in mission-critical aerospace environments.
- Own software development throughout the entire product lifecycle, including requirements definition, architecture, implementation, verification, flight test support, and operational deployment.
- Develop and maintain Board Support Packages (BSPs), hardware abstraction layers, bootloaders, and device drivers for custom avionics hardware.
- Perform board bring-up and hardware enablement activities on new processor and FPGA-based platforms.
- Develop software interfaces for sensors, actuators, radios, power systems, storage devices, and vehicle networks.
- Design and implement vehicle-wide communication architectures enabling reliable exchange of telemetry, commands, sensor data, and control information across distributed embedded computing platforms using DDS, CoAP, and other modern networking technologies.
- Support distributed vehicle software architectures including telemetry, command and control, health monitoring, fault management, and data logging systems.
- Design and execute unit tests, integration tests, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) verification campaigns.
- Debug complex software and hardware interactions using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, JTAG debuggers, and software instrumentation tools.
- Collaborate closely with electrical, systems, manufacturing, integration, and flight operations teams to rapidly identify and resolve vehicle-level issues.
- Participate in software design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, and flight readiness reviews.
- Support vehicle integration, environmental testing, flight test operations, and mission execution activities as required.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Typically 2+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for aerospace, defense, robotics, automotive, or other high-reliability systems.
- Strong proficiency in modern C and C++ development.
- Experience developing software for bare-metal, RTOS, or Embedded Linux environments.
- Experience debugging software at the hardware boundary, including processor bring-up and peripheral integration.
- Strong understanding of computer architecture, memory systems, interrupts, DMA, and embedded operating systems.
- Experience developing software interfaces for common embedded communication protocols including SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, and RS-422/-232/-485.
- Experience with software verification, unit testing, integration testing, and root-cause analysis.
- Proficiency with Git-based development workflows and modern software development practices.
- Strong Python development skills for test automation, hardware control, and engineering tooling.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work effectively across multidisciplinary engineering teams.
- Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government Secret/Top Secret security clearance.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience developing flight software for spacecraft, launch vehicles, hypersonic vehicles, autonomous aircraft, or defense systems.
- Experience with NXP i.MX RT, STM32, TI Sitara, Xilinx Zynq, AMD Versal, or similar embedded processing platforms.
- Experience developing distributed embedded systems using communication middleware and protocols such as DDS (Cyclone DDS, Fast DDS, RTI Connext), CoAP, MQTT, gRPC, REST, TCP/IP, UDP, and Ethernet.
- Experience with embedded operating systems (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Embedded Linux) and embedded Linux build systems (Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot, PetaLinux), including development of custom Linux distributions, BSPs, and production image pipelines.
- Experience developing device drivers, Board Support Packages (BSPs), bootloaders, and low-level hardware interfaces.
- Experience with deterministic networking, Precision Time Protocol (PTP), DDS middleware, or distributed embedded systems.
- Experience with high-speed interfaces such as PCIe, GigE Vision, USB 3.0, CameraLink, Aurora, or GMSL.
- Experience with FPGA development, HDL design, or hardware acceleration architectures.
- Experience developing automated test frameworks and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) systems.
- Familiarity with cybersecurity concepts, secure boot, encryption, and trusted computing architectures.
- Experience with fault-tolerant and safety-critical software architectures.
- Experience supporting vehicle integration campaigns, environmental testing, flight testing, or mission operations.
- Previous experience working in a fast-paced startup environment with aggressive development schedules.
Our office headquarters is located in Playa Vista, CA. This position requires in office presence.
The California annual base salary for this role is currently $101,000 - $160,000. Pay Grades are determined by role, level, location, and alignment with market data. Individual pay will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: interviews and an assessment of several factors that are unique to each candidate, job-related skills, relevant education and experience, certifications, abilities of the candidate and internal equity.