Software Engineer, Platform (Early Career)

Department: Engineering

Location: Torrance, CA

Compensation: $123K – $140K

Employment Type: FullTime

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

Northwood engineers and operators run hardware and software across a global network of antenna ground stations and the cloud services behind them. No one sells a platform for running a network like this at scale, so Northwood builds its own.

Platform Engineering builds the software that takes Northwood products from first prototype to full operation. That covers how code is built, tested, and released, how every site and service is monitored, and how hardware in remote locations is brought online, updated, and kept healthy. Every one of these problems has to work across every site, service, and customer at once.

Few organizations get to build this kind of software in house. What this team builds will shape how a global network of antennas is operated for the missions that depend on it. Every new antenna, site, and customer Northwood adds runs on this platform, and it sets how fast the network can grow.

As an early-career Software Engineer on the Platform team, youll ship to real production systems from your first weeks, with close mentorship, and take on more ownership as you show youre ready. You dont need to know every part of the stack today. You need to learn fast, reason clearly through problems you havent seen before, and care a lot about what you build.

Key areas of focus

Youll work across these areas over time. No one is expected to own everything listed.

• Delivery and release

  • Build the CI and release pipelines that take code from commit to production, in the cloud and at ground stations around the world.

  • Make shipping safe and continuous, with staged rollouts and fast rollback, so no one has to test in production.

• Simulation and test

  • Build simulated ground stations and lab test benches running real hardware, so every release is tested against realistic conditions before it reaches a live site.

  • Build tools that replay real recorded data through the system to catch problems early.

• Ground station operations

  • Automate how new sites are brought online, configured, and updated, in remote locations with few or no people on site.

  • Write software that runs on the servers that sit next to the antennas, and keep a global fleet of them healthy.

• Observability

  • Build the monitoring, logging, and alerting that show the health of every service and site.

  • Turn raw telemetry into signals engineers and operators can act on before a problem reaches a customer.

• Internal platform and tools

  • Build the backend services and web interfaces engineers and operators use every day to create, ship, and run software.

  • Talk directly with the people who use what you build, and turn their feedback into improvements.

• Infrastructure and security

  • Define the cloud and site infrastructure the platform runs on as code.

  • Build identity, secrets management, and least-privilege access into the platform, so every service gets them by default.

Basic Qualifications

• 0 to 2 years of professional software experience. It doesnt have to be a full-time role. Internships, research, open source, and projects outside the classroom all count, so tell us about them.

• Bachelors degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, math, or a related field. This is a soft requirement: if you didnt pursue a degree, tell us what you did instead.

• Has written real software in at least one general-purpose language (such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or C++) beyond required coursework.

• Has built and shipped something other people used or relied on.

• Has solved a hard technical problem largely on their own, such as debugging a non-obvious failure or designing a system from scratch.

Preferred Qualifications

We dont expect you to have everything below. We do expect you to go deep where your strengths are, and to take ownership of what you work on.

• Languages: proficiency in one or more languages (such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript), with opinions about which one fits which job.

• Full stack: has built a backend API and a frontend that uses it (such as a React app on a REST API).

• Shipping software: exposure to CI pipelines (such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI), containers (such as Docker), a cloud platform (such as AWS), or infrastructure as code (such as Terraform or CloudFormation).

• Systems: day-to-day comfort with Linux and the command line, or coursework and projects in operating systems, networking, or distributed systems.

• Tools for others: built a tool, script, or library other developers used.

• Hardware and space: projects involving hardware, embedded systems, RF, robotics, or space, such as a CubeSat, rocketry, or robotics team.

• Drive: a track record of going past what was asked, such as side projects, competitions, research, or things built because you wanted to.

• AI tools: comfort with AI coding tools (such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor).

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.