About Northwood

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company bringing the benefits of space to the masses through advanced communications technology. We are building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions such as national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. With a vertically integrated approach, Northwood designs, builds, and rapidly deploys scalable systems that power the next generation of space missions. If you like solving complex challenges and seeing your work deployed around the world with real impact, Northwood is the place to do it.

Role

As a Software Engineer at Northwood, you will be pivotal in designing, implementing, and optimizing the global service that delivers connectivity to our customers. You will have ownership over key areas - ranging from control of our antenna systems to the customer APIs that enable booking time on our network. An ideal candidate is someone who likes to work across areas of responsibility and can dive deep into high priority challenges.

Northwood is a full-stack company, with software development spanning everything from embedded systems and high speed networking to distributed web services. We seek versatile candidates who want to contribute across multiple areas while having a solid foundation in a few core areas of focus. Key areas of focus include—but are not limited to—the following (new team members will have the opportunity to work across these areas):

Cloud orchestration & distributed systems design

Lead the end-to-end architecture of a global, distributed control plane that schedules hundreds of satellite passes per hour across mixed AWS/on-prem nodes

Mentor teams on fault-tolerant patterns and land design RFCs that become Northwood standards

API, database & front end development

Build and own customer-facing and internal control-plane APIs – craft, version, and operate the endpoints that let users search, reserve, update, and cancel satellite passes at multi-thousand-request scale

Design and implement the underlying workflow-orchestrator that coordinates satellite communications across sites, reconciles conflicts, and enables autonomous coordination across the worlds largest ground network

Architect the real-time TT&C / data-transfer interfaces – deliver a secure, bidirectional streaming channel that carries command uplink, telemetry downlink, and supports near-real-time data delivery across Northwood’s global ground network.

Edge systems (ground station)

Design and implement control systems for our ground station hardware, you will write software that interacts with everything from embedded systems to RF modems

High bandwidth data movement

Architect and optimize data pipelines for efficient movement of data between ground stations and various end environments

Architect a Tbps-class SD-WAN overlay (WireGuard + QUIC) that transparently shifts traffic between sites, S3-compatible buckets and customer VPCs, with per-flow QoS and FEC.

Monitoring & alerting systems

Create comprehensive monitoring and alerting solutions for software and infrastructure

Implement tools to ensure continuous uptime and rapid issue resolution

Global telemetry capabilities

Transform our telemetry data into actionable insights, enabling predictive diagnostics to address issues before they arise; keep our customers informed about relevant operations in real time

Infrastructure, security & pipelines

A global network requires global deployments, and Northwood is committed to building a secure, reliable, and stable pipeline. This infrastructure empowers our developers to deploy changes continuously—without the risk of disrupting the system or relying on 'testing in prod.'

Production line software & testing

Develop software for production line bring-up and testing

Automate testing procedures to ensure hardware and software reliability

Working alongside mechanical/RF/EE/FPGA and SW engineers to ensure system correctness, performance, and reliability before leaving our manufacturing line