Lead Flight Software

Here at The Exploration Company, we are building spacecrafts for humanity.

The Lead Flight Software owns the end-to-end delivery of all flight software, simulation environments, and supporting tools and software test setups required to fly, verify, and certify the vehicle.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will manage four teams (~20 engineers total) while staying technically sharp and deeply involved in architecture, trade-offs, and critical design decisions. You are accountable for delivering reliable, certifiable software in a fast-moving, resource-constrained startup environment.

What You Will Do

You will define and evolve the overall flight software architecture, ensuring that it is robust, scalable, and aligned with mission and safety requirements. You will personally drive key architectural and system-level decisions, review critical designs and code, and ensure that technical trade-offs are made deliberately and transparently.

You will establish a strong interface between flight software, avionics, GNC, systems engineering, and safety teams, making sure that integration risks are identified early and resolved systematically. You will shape the verification and validation ecosystem, including SIL, HIL, and Monte Carlo campaigns, and automated test pipelines. It will be your