Engineering Lead - Prism

Department: Engineering

Location: Torrance, CA

Compensation: $174K – $239K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

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:

Prism is our parabolic dish product line. We are looking for an Engineering Lead to own the software for it - the embedded software running on the antenna, the backend services that command and monitor it, and the interfaces between them. Most of the interesting work sits at the seam between embedded and the server side. You would own both sides of it, and you would own how quickly a change can move across it: make the change, test it against real or simulated hardware, and integrate it with the control side without waiting on a trip to a site. Getting that loop faster is the thing we care most about here. You would own backend and embedded to start, and we expect the scope to grow into FPGA and other hardware-adjacent areas fairly quickly. You would work closely with our FPGA leads from the start. As the team grows, FPGA engineers may end up reporting to you. We are not asking you to be an FPGA engineer - we want someone who can hold the whole design in their head and make good calls about what belongs in silicon, in firmware, and on the server. You would report to the Prism product owner and lead a team of 2-5 engineers to start and grow the team to 10+. The size depends on how much of embedded ends up under your ownership, which is something we would work out with you during the process rather than decide in advance.

Responsibilities:

• Own the Prism software end to end - embedded software on the antenna, the backend services that command and supervise it, and the contracts between them.

• Set the design direction across the embedded/backend seam: where state lives, what the control loops own, and how commands and telemetry are modeled.

• Make the develop-test-integrate loop fast. Build the hardware-in-the-loop rigs, simulators, and test automation so that changes are exercised against real and simulated hardware before they reach a site.

• Own telemetry and automation for the product: what a dish reports and how often, how it is calibrated and health-checked, and how it detects and recovers from its own faults.

• Define and version the interface Prism exposes to the platform - tasking, telemetry, state, and diagnostics - and keep it stable enough for the Cloud team to build against.

• Lead the team building it: set technical direction, mentor, review designs, and help grow the team as the scope expands.

• Work with FPGA, DSP, RF, and mechanical engineers on where functionality belongs, and what software needs to do • Work hands-on in the lab and at sites when integration needs it.

Where This Role Ends

Prism has an agreed boundary with the operational platform. The line sits at the platform code - how the network uses the system, rather than how the system works.

• You own everything that makes a Prism dish a working, testable product: embedded software, device and control services, telemetry generation, calibration, fault detection and recovery, test rigs and simulation, and the versioned interface the platform commands it through.

• The Cloud team owns what turns many Prisms into a network: scheduling and orchestration, fleet configuration and rollout, network-wide state and observability, operator tooling, and the customer-facing APIs.

• Other hardware product lines have their own leads. You own Prism's software, not all of Northwood's hardware software.

• The interface between you and Cloud is designed together and versioned. Neither side reaches across it, and neither side should be blocked waiting on the other to ship.

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of professional software development experience.

• 3+ years building production software that controls, monitors, or automates physical hardware - ground systems, robotics, industrial automation, test equipment, or similar edge environments.

• Experience on both sides of the embedded/server boundary. You have written embedded software and the backend that drives it, and you have views on where the line between them belongs.

• Engineering leadership or tech lead experience, with a track record of mentoring engineers and shipping as a team.

• Deep experience designing how services communicate: interface and API design, state machines, and failure handling across process and machine boundaries.

• Strong systems programming skills in languages suited to concurrent, high-reliability software (e.g., Rust, Go, C++, or similar).

• Experience building test infrastructure alongside the feature - HITL rigs, simulators, automated integration against real hardware.

• A reliability mindset: you instrument what you build, design for failure, and treat automated testing as a first-class part of the system.

Preferred Qualifications:

• •Familiarity with RF systems, antenna control, timing and synchronization, or satellite communications.

• Exposure to FPGA or DSP work - enough to partner well and make good partitioning calls, even if you do not write RTL yourself.

• Experience operating fleets of remote or edge systems: deployment, configuration management, over-the-air updates, and rollback at scale.

• Experience with high-rate telemetry, data capture, or streaming pipelines at the edge.

• Experience leading engineers across more than one discipline.

• Comfort working hands-on in a lab or at a site alongside hardware, RF, and operations engineers

Additional Information:

If you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Northwood Space is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood Space is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.