The final job level and salary will be determined based on a range of factors including the candidate’s education, qualifications, knowledge, skills, abilities, and relevant experience. The listed salary range is provided to offer insight into potential compensation, but it’s not a guarantee of the final offer. While we include the full range to be transparent, offers most often fall within the middle portion rather than the top.

Xona is the navigational intelligence company bringing real-time, centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth.

With Pulsar – the world’s most advanced PNT satellite infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit – Xona will offer a future-proof, backwards-compatible global positioning system optimized for absolute precision, superior power, and robust protection.

This is an individual contributor role for an Embedded Software Engineer to join our team, focusing on the application software for our satellite systems. You’ll be instrumental in maintaining and evolving the software the drives our proprietary hardware, as well as upgrading and extending our build system to ensure robust on-orbit updates.

What You’ll Do

• Develop, maintain, and enhance embedded application software for Xona’s satellite systems

• Maintain and extend drivers supporting in-house programmable logic (PL) deployments

• Improve the robustness, reliability, and scalability of the build system and dependency chain

• Develop software for PL fault detection and provide interfaces for upstream redundancy configuration

• Evolve software applications as requirements change by adding, modifying, or removing features

• Extend and maintain Xona’s custom Linux OS to support high-performance control and data transfer with proprietary hardware

• Implement hardware emulation frameworks to support software development, build, and test workflows

• Support and automate CI/CD pipelines for full PS+PL image testing and deployment

• Contribute to the Xona OS roadmap, including exploration of asymmetric processing architectures

Required Qualifications

• 3–5 years of professional experience in embedded software development

• Strong proficiency in C/C++

• Experience with CMake-based build systems

• Hands-on experience with low-level firmware development and debugging

• Strong documentation practices and attention to detail

• Ability to work independently as an individual contributor in a complex technical environment

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with AMD/Xilinx platforms, ideally RFSoC or Zynq UltraScale+, including PS+PL architectures

• Background in real-time operating systems (RTOS)

• Familiarity with CI/CD and DevOps practices for embedded systems

• Prior experience developing flight software or software for space systems

• Hands-on lab experience testing engineering models and flight hardware

• Knowledge of PetaLinux and Yocto build flows

• Experience integrating hardware emulation frameworks such as QEMU

For U.S. Roles: To comply with U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the United States (i.e. Green Card holder), or other protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).

For U.K. Roles: To comply with U.K. regulations, this role requires Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) checks, and successful candidates must be eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC).

For Canada Roles: Successful candidates must obtain and hold a security clearance at the reliability status level, and pass security assessment for the Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) and ITAR.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Compensation Range: $112K - $130K