Spire

Director of Software Engineering

Boulder, Colorado, United States · Director

Sponsorship not specified$171k-$203kDetected 2 days ago

PythonDistributed SystemsAlgorithmsCloud PlatformsSite Reliability EngineeringMachine LearningLeadershipCommunicationMentoring

About the role

Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation.
The old model relies on operators, escalations, manual processes, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts.
It does not scale and it does not belong in a modern space company.

Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations
Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them
Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world-class reliability and platform engineers
Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of
Lead the shift from manual, operator-driven processes to fully automated and self-healing operations
Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation
Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions
Spire Global is a space-to-cloud analytics company that owns and operates the largest multi-purpose constellation of satellites.
This Director will lead that transformation.

7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role
You have owned things that could not go down.
Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation.
You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it.
You know what great looks like and how to find it.
To help maintain a safe and secure workplace for Spire employees, all candidates who receive a conditional offer will be required to complete a background check.

Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems
Experience writing performance software in Rust
Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real-time environments
A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo
Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role.
If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses-this is not something candidates need to have before applying. #LI-MK1
🛰️ Name Your Satellite Program (NYSP)
🚀 Launch Attendance

You will set the technical vision, define the architecture, build and inspire the team, and personally raise the standard for what modern space operations look like.
🌴 Generous Time Off Policy
🎓 Education Assistance Program
📈 Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
👣 Family Leave
💪 Fitness Reimbursement
In addition to its constellation, Spire's data infrastructure includes a global ground station network and 24/7 operations that provide real-time global coverage of every point on Earth.

We are moving from a model where trained operators watch dashboards and escalate to experts, to one where the system is fully autonomous, self-healing, and data intelligent.

This listing is sourced directly from Spire's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.