Role highlights

Senior Software Engineer (Tasking and Planning)

Location: Valencia

Department: Ground Segment

Reports to: Senior Staff Software Engineer

Employment type: Permanent

Workplace model: Hybrid

Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required)

Why this role matters

There are very few positions where you write software that directs a satellite to collect intelligence from space. Where the physics is real, the users are in the room, and the platform is early enough that you shape what it becomes.

We are building capability that contributes to the defence of Europe. The standards are high, the problems are hard, and the impact is tangible. If you want to bring great technical skill to a mission that matters, we would like to hear from you.

Who We Are

ICEYE is the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space. We deliver persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth.

ICEYE owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation. To our customers we provide intelligence with unmatched quality, latency and revisit times, in any weather, day or night. To governments who choose to operate their own constellation we provide this proven capability as a sovereign system.

ICEYE-built constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future.

Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

What you will build

Domain Services. Backend services handling task management and sensor planning. Event-driven workers that perform opportunity calculation and synchronise state asynchronously via NATS JetStream. PostgreSQL for persistence. Responsiveness and resilience at the service of the mission.

Customer-facing APIs. Stable, performant interfaces that can evolve but must not break users in doing so. The observability stack and troubleshooting capabilities needed to support our customers in production.

Geospatial Databases. Performant indexes able to resolve geospatial queries against large datasets and ingest new data often.

Tasking and Planning Engines. Orbit propagation, pass prediction, acquisition geometry, sensor configuration parameters, and coverage footprint computation. Applied science mathematics turned into operational capability via Software.

Whatever the future brings. Cross-sensor coordination, satellite autonomy, new collection strategies, and capabilities that will emerge from continuous learning and close collaboration with customers

What we’re looking for

Must haves

Strong software engineering fundamentals. You design evolvable, resilient, performant systems. You can reason about concurrency and how transactions work. You can make calculated trade-offs between Performance, Consistency and Availability. You are able to choose technologies and design data models that optimise for their data ingestion and access patterns. You understand the difference between “At most once”, “At least once” and how to design systems around those guarantees.

Production experience. You have designed, built, and operated services in production that served real customers and had real economic consequences attached to their availability. You know how to make your systems resilient and observable.

API design experience. You know how to design APIs that enable users, encapsulate unnecessary complexity, and expose opportunity. APIs that remain evolvable but don’t break users who don’t want to adopt the new features.

AI-leaning attitude and experience. You understand that AI is restructuring how knowledge work is done and are open to continuously learning about it. You know how to leverage agentic workflows in multiple stages of your engineering process. Not tentatively, but as a primary tool. You understand their strengths and limitations, and you use them to move faster without sacrificing quality.