About Lodestar

Lodestar's mission is to develop the first "Protect and Defend" capability for high-value space assets in orbit. Our flagship product MITHRIL is the critical hardware & software necessary to augment any off-the-shelf spacecraft with the ability to autonomously detect, characterise, and reversibly neutralise orbital threats. By building on the proven space heritage of our best-in-class satellite-bus partners and fully integrating MITHRIL as a single platform, we deliver a fully autonomous end-to-end protection spacecraft service.

About the Job

At Lodestar, as a Simulations Software Engineer, you'll build the environment in which MITHRIL is developed, tested and proven. Every autonomy behaviour we fly is validated in simulation first, which makes the simulator one of the highest-leverage pieces of software in the company: if it isn't faithful, nothing downstream can be trusted.

You'll develop high-fidelity sensor and environment models in Unreal Engine, stand up the software- and hardware-in-the-loop benches that our flight software runs against, and design the distributed services that let scenarios run reproducibly across machines and in CI. You'll work directly with the perception, prediction, decision, and missions teams to decide what needs simulating, at what fidelity, and why.

We proudly have an "extreme ownership" oriented engineering culture.

What You’ll Do

Build and extend the mission simulation environment that Lodestar's autonomy stack is developed and validated against
Develop high-fidelity sensor and environment models - electro-optical cameras, orbital lighting and illumination
Build software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop test benches so that flight software can be trialed against realistic simulated missions
Design distributed simulation services to run mission scenarios at scale
Own the internal simulation tooling, telemetry, and regression frameworks

Basic Qualifications

We are hiring this role at mid-senior level. All levels require a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Aerospace, Robotics, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.

6+ years of industry experience, including end-to-end ownership of a simulation stack or a major simulation subsystem
Track record architecting simulation infrastructure - deciding what to model at what fidelity, and defending those trade-offs to engineering stakeholders
Depth in real-time distributed system design: determinism, time synchronisation, clock management, and reproducibility across nodes
Experience standing up HIL benches or SIL pipelines from scratch, including CI integration and automated regression testing
Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction across team boundaries
Comfortable deriving requirements from first principles

Preferred Skills & Experience

Familiarity with orbital mechanics and Basilisk
Experience with physics engines and rigid-body dynamics
Sensor modelling experience across electro-optical, LIDAR, RADAR, or RF sensors
Experience with GPU rendering pipelines or CUDA for accelerated simulation and synthetic data generation
Exposure to robotics or space simulation frameworks such as Gazebo, Isaac Sim, Basilisk, or 42
Experience with distributed transports (DDS, Zenoh, gRPC) and time-synchronisation protocols (PTP, NTP)
Experience with Linux, Git, and CI/CD pipelines
Comfortable with containerisation and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes
Strong understanding of networking and communication protocols for distributed autonomy systems

Candidates should have strong expertise in any or all orbital dynamic simulation, 3D game engines, or distributed simulation architecture (ROS2).

ITAR Requirements

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. Learn more about the ITAR here.