Staff Software Engineer, IR Data Products

The posting, as Muon Space wrote it

About the role

Muon Space is building and operating a growing portfolio of infrared (IR) space missions that generate mission-critical Earth observation data for a diverse and expanding set of customers. These missions include the FireSat constellation, which delivers calibrated IR imagery and derived wildfire products to wildfire operators, the scientific community, the US Government, and commercial partners; and the Space Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) mission, which provides data for weather and cloud characterization, situational awareness, and a broad range of additional use cases. Muon's IR Data Products team owns the multi-mission, multi-customer software systems that process, store, and disseminate the data from these missions — turning raw downlink into calibrated imagery and derived products, and delivering those products reliably and at low latency to customers at scale.

This role is an architecture and technical-leadership seat for the Software focus area of the IR Data Products team. The engineer will own architecture and cross-team execution across defined IR data-system domains, translating longer-term technical direction into multi-quarter designs and delivered production systems. This role will lead multi-quarter initiatives to design and build scalable software architectures that make the system fast, cheap, reliable, evolvable, and ready for many-satellite scale.

In this role, the candidate will work across four key areas:

• Architecture & implementation leadership for the next-year horizon: Own key aspects of the architectural direction for the data systems for Muon’s IR Missions — pre-processing, processing directives & routing, delivery orchestration, compliance evaluation, and the orchestration platform itself.
• Low-latency optimization & core infrastructure: Own key aspects of the technical roadmap to low-latency processing. Own structural designs such as event-driven microservices, cloud infrastructure design and optimization, and algorithmic optimizations.
• Geospatial tooling: Own key aspects of the architectural direction for how we store, catalog, serve, and version geospatial data (NetCDF, Zarr, HDF, STAC, tile stores) at scale.
• MLOps foundations: Build the production foundations for ML products — model packaging, experiment tracking, GPU-backed training and inference — that our derived-product work (hotspots, perimeters, fire behavior) will increasingly depend on.

Additionally, the role will represent the team in cross-functional design reviews, drive prioritization syncs with Technical Program Managers and Business Development, and set software standards for the team’s codebase and development practices. This engineer will mentor senior and mid-level engineers across the team and raise the bar on how we reason about failure modes, immutability, idempotency, and reprocessing.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on staff-level engineer with a track record of leading multi-quarter architectural init
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aking Care of Our Team

At Muon salary is only part of our total compensation package. In addition to salary, full-time employees receive equity compensation as well as benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401k retirement plan, short & long term disability and life insurance. We also offer three weeks paid vacation for new employees, along with 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time and paid parental leave.

Our mission embraces the entire planet and we believe our team should too. Muon is dedicated to creating a diverse and dynamic company and workforce. We believe in equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, age, national origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or gender identity. We value diversity in the workplace, and that starts with our applicants. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check all the boxes, and we look forward to reviewing your application! In addition, if you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

Muon is currently registered and able to hire in the following states:
AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, IA, ID, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, TN, TX, VT, VA, WA

ITAR/EAR Requirements

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. The Company may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.