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# Lead Flight Software Engineer (Founding Engineer)

- **Company:** Evona, Inc.
- **Location:** Niwot, CO, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Continuous Integration, Device Drivers, Safety Critical Systems
- **Published:** October 2, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.disabledperson.com/jobs/75665432-lead-flight-software-engineer-founding-engineer

## About the Role

* Significant experience owning or leading flight software for spacecraft
 * Deep embedded background
 * Hands-on experience with FDIR and/or safety-critical systems
 * Comfortable and excited about building architectures and systems from the ground up

If you've owned flight software, know what it takes to make an autonomous vehicle safe-able in orbit, and want the responsibility that comes with being an early technical leader building something new in space, we'd love to hear from you.

## Description

This will be a Founding-level role: You will be a core technical leader in the business, with meaningful equity and involvement in technical decisions, customer engagement, and building the team.

From a technical perspective this is not a role where you'll inherit or maintain a flight software stack, you'll architect it, and everything their drones do in orbit will run on it.

What You'll Own:

 * Build the flight software platform and team that will fly thousands of autonomous space drones across commercial inspection and defense programs
 * Architect the FSW stack end-to-end including framework, command and telemetry, boot and mode sequencing, and device drivers
 * Select flight computers and design the drone compute and avionics architecture
 * Write drivers for various drone subsystems
 * Design, develop, and validate drone flight, ground, and sim software
 * Deliver flight-proven software by owning the on-orbit heritage payload
 * The avionics and autonomy stack that flies as a hosted payload and returns real orbital data before their first vehicle
 * Help build a comprehensive but lean EDU, including an expansive "air-floor" for rapid flight iteration and validation
 * Build the CI/CD, hardware-in-the-loop test benches, and sim environments that allows them to rapidly iterate and validate
 * Qualify COTS avionics in-house
 * Lead software readiness and own the go/no-go for FSW deployment
 * Recruit and mentor the leading autonomous flight software team for precision inspection, RPOD, and formation flying
 * Help build the company as a technical co-founder, supporting across all decisions, customer engagements, hiring, and program reviews