Software Engineer, IR Data Products
Muon SpaceSan Jose, California, United States · Posted 22 days agoDescription
About the role
Muon Space is building a family of infrared imaging missions designed for global wildfire detection and monitoring, weather and cloud characterization, space-based environmental monitoring, and more. Muon's IR Data Products team builds the analytics system that turns raw imagery from our spacecraft's custom multispectral instruments into calibrated, orthorectified, analysis-ready products — and delivers them fast enough to be useful while a fire is still burning.
In this role you will build and operate the production pipeline that does this. Our system ingests raw frames from orbit, calibrates and geolocates them, orthorectifies them into map-projected tiles, and derives fire detections and perimeters — all under a hard latency budget, and increasingly on a continuous basis across a growing constellation.
This is hands-on production software engineering on a system with real users and real deadlines. Wildfire response agencies act on what we ship. You will work alongside remote sensing scientists who define what the products must be, and own turning that into code that runs reliably, at scale, and on time.
This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our San Jose, CA office three days per week.
Responsibilities
- Build, test, and maintain production data processing pipelines for infrared imagery, from raw frames through calibrated and orthorectified products.
- Improve pipeline performance against latency targets — profiling, parallelization, and eliminating fixed overhead in the critical path.
- Implement and operate workflow orchestration for continuous, automated processing across multiple satellites.
- Build monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling; participate in an on-call rotation for the systems you help build.
- Work with remote sensing scientists to turn algorithms and prototypes into production-ready, tested, maintainable code.
- Contribute to code review, testing practices, and technical documentation in a shared codebase.
- Diagnose and fix data quality and processing failures, including tracing problems back through the pipeline to their source.
- Learn new topics as needed (remote sensing measurement techniques, geospatial data engineering, customer domain-specific implications).
Qualifications
- BS, Masters, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, a physical science, or equivalent practical experience.
- BS +5 years or MS +3 years of relevant professional experience beyond internships.
- Solid Python skills, and experience writing code that other people depend on — tested, reviewed, and maintained over time.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and containerized deployment.
- Comfort working with data at a scale where naive approaches stop working.
- Ability to work with a distributed, interdisciplinary team (scientists, engineers, data support).
- Willingness to learn the science domain well enough to reason about whether output is correct, not just whether the job succeeded.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with geospatial data tooling and formats (e.g. XArray, COG, GeoTIFF, NetCDF, GDAL, Zarr).
- Experience with workflow orchestration systems (Flyte, Airflow, or similar).
- Experience with performance profiling and optimization of data-intensive systems.
- Experience with satellite, remote sensing, or other scientific imagery pipelines.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or similar).
- Experience operating production systems on call.
Salary
The salary range for this role is $156,000 - $186,000, plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits package. Final compensation will be determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location as assessed during the interview process.
About Muon Space
Founded in 2021, Muon Space is an end-to-end Space Systems Provider that designs, builds, and operates LEO satellite constellations delivering mission-critical data. Our revolutionary, integrated technology stack enables customers to optimize every dimension of their missions for faster time-to-orbit and superior constellation remote sensing performance. Our state-of-the-art facility in the heart of Silicon Valley is optimized for manufacturing spacecraft and rapid, flexible payload integration at scale. From climate monitoring to national security, Muon Space is dedicated to delivering Earth Intelligence for a safer and more resilient world.
Taking 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.
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.
Similar jobs
Est. 186,500 USD
About the role Muon Space is building and operating a growing portfolio of infrared (IR) space missions — starting with the FireSat constellation — that generate mission-critical imagery and analytics of interest to the…
Est. 149,500 USD
About the role Muon Space is seeking a creative and technically rigorous Senior Applied Scientist, Geospatial to join our Mission Innovation team. In this high-impact, "zero-to-one" role, you will bridge the gap between…
Est. 191,500 USD
About the role We are seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager (TPM) to drive cross-functional planning and execution for our IR Data Product Team. This role will focus on managing the delivery of improvements and new…
Est. 203,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Instrument Calibration Scientist to join our team in Mountain View, CA with a focus on calibration of infrared remote sensing instruments. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated engine…
Est. 194,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Instrument Systems Engineer to join our team in Mountain View, CA or Remote, with a focus on infrared remote sensing instruments. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated engineer with a…
Est. 196,000 USD
About the role Muon is looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Back-end) to join our Ground Software team. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated and versatile software engineer who is excited to build our cloud infrast…
Est. 202,500 USD
About the role Muon Space is seeking a creative and technically rigorous Staff Advanced Programs Lead - EO/IR to join our Mission Innovation team. In this high-impact role, you will lead strategic capture efforts and dri…
Est. 166,500 USD
About the role Muon Space is seeking a creative and technically rigorous Senior Systems Engineer, EO/IR Payloads to join our Mission Innovation team. In this high-impact role, you will drive the technical exploration of…
Est. 170,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Camera Systems Engineer to join our team in Mountain View, CA developing infrared remote sensing instruments. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated engineer with a versatile skill set…
Est. 194,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Staff Optical Engineer to act as a technical lead on our team in Mountain View, CA or Remote, developing infrared remote sensing instruments. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated expert wit…
Est. 193,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Manager of Instrument Design to build, mentor, and guide a multidisciplinary team of optical and optomechanical engineers. In this role, you will establish the technical vision, design methodo…
Est. 196,000 USD
About the role Muon is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Software Platform team. This team builds and operates the paved roads (CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bazel, AWS, IAM, data infrastructure, and mor…
Est. 164,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Program Manager to lead delivery of next-generation Infrared Satellites. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role at the intersection of payload engineering and rapid-cycle space veh…
Est. 171,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Software Engineer to join our Mission Frontend team. In this role you will build and ship features across our Mission Command platform, the consolidated frontend for mission operations, custom…
Est. 222,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Staff Software Engineer to join our Information Systems team. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated and versatile software engineer with a strong desire to develop mission-critical internal…
Est. 155,500 USD
About the role Software Engineers at Muon work on embedded software on satellites and test equipment, physics simulations, customer-facing APIs and services, user interfaces, scheduling algorithms, data pipelines, comput…
Est. 171,000 USD
About the Role Muon seeks a Software Engineer to join our Simulation team. An ideal candidate is a capable generalist software engineer who is as comfortable building reliable web services as they are delivering high-per…
Est. 229,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Systems Engineer, Mission Platforms to join our Mission Engineering team. At Muon, we are delivering missions to help understand and act on Earth and climate intelligence. As a Mission Platfor…
Est. 204,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Systems Engineer, Mission Platforms to join our Mission Engineering team. At Muon, we are delivering missions to help understand and act on Earth and climate intelligence. As a Mission Platfor…
Est. 206,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Principal Mission Architect and mission formulation lead to join our mission development team to help direct the development of new mission architectures. The ideal candidate is a self-motivat…
Est. 175,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Systems Engineer, Mission Success & Performance to join our Mission Engineering team. As we scale the Muon Mission Foundry, we need a strategic architect of mission success, someone…
Est. 171,000 USD
About the role Muon Space is seeking a GPU Engineer to join our High Performance Compute (HPC) team. You will design and develop GPU-accelerated software that runs onboard orbiting satellites, powering mission-critical w…
Est. 194,500 USD
About the role Muon Space seeks a Senior Optomechanical Engineer to join our team in Mountain View, CA or Remote, supporting the production of infrared remote sensing instruments. The ideal candidate is a self-motivated…
Est. 222,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead our Software Platform team. This team builds and operates the paved roads (CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bazel, AWS, IAM, data infrastructure, and m…
Est. 247,000 USD
About the role Muon Space is hiring a Senior Product Manager to own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of our internal Information Systems. You will be responsible for designing and managing various internal software an…
Est. 176,500 USD
About the role We are seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager (TPM) to drive cross-functional planning and execution for our Software programs. In this role, you will work closely with engineering leaders across softw…
Est. 175,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Mission Lead Systems Engineer to join our Mission Engineering team. At Muon, we are developing multiple missions to help understand and act on Earth and climate intelligence. As a Senio…
Est. 194,000 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Instrument Technical Program Manager (TPM) to join our team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end delivery of state-of-the-art electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) remote sensing instr…
Est. 194,500 USD
About the role Muon seeks a Senior Optical Engineer to join our team developing infrared remote sensing instruments. You will own stray light control and analysis by defining precise requirements for optical components a…
Est. 229,000 USD
About the Role Muon seeks a Staff Mission Lead Systems Engineer to join our Mission Execution team. At Muon, we are developing multiple missions to help understand and act on Earth and climate intelligence. As a Staff Mi…