About Cowboy Space Corp

Mission

Cowboy Space Corporation is solving the global energy crisis by building the infrastructure for abundant, resilient space-based solar energy. We are tackling one of humanity’s most complex engineering challenges with a world-class team dedicated to delivering a revolutionary power platform. Cowboy Space Corporation is transforming how civilization powers, computes and connects - from orbit to Earth.

Background

Cowboy Space Corporation is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our modular, scalable satellites collect sunlight in Low Earth Orbit to enable multiple integrated applications: transmitting energy via infrared lasers (space-to-earth and space-to-space), powering on-orbit high-performance computing clusters (GPU/TPU), and providing secure, high bandwidth optical data transport.

Current energy and data systems rely on complex logistics and outdated infrastructure. Cowboy Space Corporation overcomes these challenges by enabling direct, on-demand, secure, and scalable energy distribution and data processing from space. This will revolutionize how we operate in orbit and on Earth, supporting the rapidly expanding space industrial base, ISAM (In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing) operations, remote regions, and military bases.

Baiju Bhatt founded Cowboy Space Corporation in 2024. Inspired by his father’s work with NASA Langley Research Center, Baiju earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics at Stanford before co-founding Robinhood, now a public company that has helped over 20 million Americans access the financial system. Cowboy Space Corporation has raised ~$365 million from Index Ventures, Interlagos, Construct Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and others.

This is an ambitious mission that demands extraordinary talent. Cowboy Space Corporation’s team has worked at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Astranis and NASA, and is based in San Carlos, CA. If you're ready to solve complex technical challenges and help build the most important energy company in the world, we want to hear from you.

Location: San Carlos, CA or Kent, WA (on-site)

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Flight Software Engineer to own the software that flies on our spacecraft. You'll be responsible for the payload flight software—written in Rust—spanning attitude and pointing state machines, on-board command handling, and telemetry and data storage. Today this work is distributed across several engineers; we need a senior technical owner to unify the architecture, set the patterns and conventions the team builds on, and drive the software toward a near-term on-orbit demonstration.

Responsibilities

Serve as the technical lead and owner for payload flight software, from architecture through on-orbit operations

Design, develop, and test flight software in Rust for attitude and pointing state machines, command handling, and telemetry/data storage

Define the software architecture, coding patterns, and conventions adopted across the flight software team

Establish and uphold the bar for flight-quality software: determinism, fault tolerance, testability, and safe behavior under failure

Design and implement fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) behaviors at the software level

Build and maintain automated test infrastructure, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing

Collaborate closely with GNC, avionics, electrical, and systems engineers to define interfaces and system behavior

Support spacecraft integration, environmental test campaigns, and launch and early-orbit operations

Investigate anomalies across hardware/software boundaries, perform root cause analysis, and drive fixes to closure

Mentor engineers on the team and review designs and code to raise overall software quality

Help drive the team toward a near-term on-orbit demonstration, making pragmatic scope and risk tradeoffs along the way

Basic Qualifications

5+ years of experience (or equivalent practical experience) developing flight software or software for other high-reliability, safety-critical systems