# Backend Software Engineer - Mission Planning Strategy

**Company:** [Loft Orbital](https://zerogtalent.com/space-companies/loft-orbital)
**Location:** Golden, CO
**Work mode:** On-site
**Employment type:** Full Time
**Salary:** USD 140K–190K/yr
**Category:** Software
**Department:** Software
**Listed:** 2026-11-09

[View and apply on Zero G Talent](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/backend-software-engineer-mission-planning-strategy-34f8566b-dd24-42b3-8f34-a395ecb5c2c6)

## What you'll do

- Develop software for multi-sensor satellite constellation tasking
- Design customer-facing interfaces and back-end pipelines
- Build capacity planning tools for sales and operators
- Solve multi-objective optimization problems for collection capacity
- Design scalable systems of systems with clear interfaces

## What you need

- Bachelor's degree in engineering, physics, or mathematics
- 2+ yrs backend software development experience
- Python proficiency for libraries and services
- System design experience
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills

## Job description

**Wanna join the adventure?**

Loft Orbital is looking for a **Backend Software Engineer** to join the Mission Platform organization.

You'll work on a small and driven team, developing a brand new software product that optimizes tasking across a large heterogeneous constellation of multi-sensor satellites:

-   scale to fly 50+ satellites, serving 100,000s of customer tasking orders
    
-   design, build and optimize a brand new product from scratch
    
-   solve challenging problems across multiple domains:
    
    -   Astrodynamics, satellite capacity modeling and simulation
        
    -   Back-end/API performance
        
    -   Low latency, high responsiveness system design
        
    -   Mathematical optimization and scheduling problems
        

We're looking for someone with a solid background in software engineering, ideally with a proven track record of building systems from scratch and solving complex, system-level problems. The ideal candidate can operate independently in a fast-paced environment and challenge requirements.

### About this role:

-   **Develop and improve** a new software product that manages customer orders across a multi-sensor constellation of satellites
-   **Interface with teams** to help design the customer-facing interfaces and the back-end pipeline that goes from a plan to onboard execution
-   **Build tools and services** that help sales and operators understand current and future capacity, operational risks and opportunities for growth
-   **Solve complex multi-objective optimization problems** that maximize collection capacity, balancing various (conflicting) customer constraints, and help define what “optimal” means
-   **Design** systems of systems: decompose complex problems into well-bounded services with clear interfaces, and reason about how they interact, fail, and scale together

### Must Haves:

-   Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
-   2+ years of experience with designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
-   Proven track record of operating independently and solving complex problems
-   Experience with system design
-   Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, for technical and non-technical audiences

### Nice to Haves:

-   Master’s degree in Software Engineering, Physics/Astrodynamics, Mathematics or a related field
-   5+ years of experience designing and developing software libraries and backend services, preferably in Python
-   Proficiency with Django/GraphQL stacks
-   Hands-on experience operating spacecraft
-   Experience with C++ / high-performance Python (vectorization, JIT compilation like Numba, GPU parallelization)
-   Demonstrated practical experience building high-performance backend software applications and/or libraries
-   Specialization in one of the following disciplines:
    -   Integer/linear/multi-objective optimization or other Operations Research style problems
    -   Back-end/API performance optimization
    -   Distributed systems
    -   Security
    -   Earth observation tasking
    -   High-performance computing

### Some of Our Awesome Benefits:

-   100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance option for employees and dependents
-   Flexible Spending (FSA) and Health Savings (HSA) Accounts offered with an employer contribution to the HSA
-   100% employer paid Life, AD&D, Short-Term, and Long-Term Disability insurance
-   Flexible Time Off policy for vacation and sick leave, and 12 paid holidays
-   401(k) plan and equity options
-   Daily catered lunches and snacks
-   International exposure to our team in France
-   Fully paid parental leave; 14 weeks for primary caregiver and 10 weeks for secondary caregiver
-   Carrot Fertility provides comprehensive, inclusive fertility healthcare and family-forming benefits with financial support
-   Off-sites and many social events and celebrations
-   Relocation assistance when applicable

 _\*__Research shows that while men apply to jobs where they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other underrepresented people tend to only apply when they meet 100% of the qualifications. At Loft, we value respectful debate and people who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions.  We strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t check all the boxes._

  

**Who We Are**

  

Loft: Space Made Simple. 

  

Founded in 2017, Loft provides governments, companies, and research institutions with a fast, reliable, and simple way to deploy missions in orbit.

  

We integrate, launch, and operate spacecraft, offering end-to-end missions as a service across Earth observation, IoT connectivity, on-orbit AI, national security missions, and more. Leveraging our existing space infrastructure and an extensive inventory of satellite buses, Loft is reducing years-long integration and launch timelines to months. With more than 30 missions flown, Loft’s flight heritage and proven technologies enable customers to focus on their mission objectives.

  

With a growing fleet on track to reach 30 satellites by 2027, we are scaling up quickly across our offices in San Francisco, CA | Golden, CO | and Toulouse, France to meet accelerating demand for space infrastructure.

  

_As an international company your resume will be reviewed by people across our offices so please attach a copy in English._

## Other open roles at Loft Orbital

- [Backend Software Engineer - Mission Planning Strategy](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/backend-software-engineer-mission-planning-strategy-63013f70-6e68-4e73-9ae4-bae1dcccdf14) — San Francisco, CA
- [Backend Software Engineer - Mission Planning Strategy](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/backend-software-engineer-mission-planning-strategy-2ea9ab3f-15b9-4b1b-9a69-d8a22e54e587) — Toulouse, Occitanie
- [Test Infrastructure Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/test-infrastructure-engineer-8f6c6aa1-7985-45d9-8d9f-c0fac704de43) — Abu Dhabi
- [Recruiter](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/recruiter-bd340540-62b7-412d-9b35-8ec72f626187) — Abu Dhabi
- [Team Lead - Cloud Infrastructure](https://zerogtalent.com/space-jobs/loft-orbital/team-lead-cloud-infrastructure-17968c7a-a3e9-436a-a659-139bc927aa9b) — Toulouse, Occitanie

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*Source: [Zero G Talent](https://zerogtalent.com), the job board for space, defense, AI, robotics and frontier-tech companies.*