Software Safety & Mission Assurance Specialist

Our mission is to provide real-time on-orbit connectivity for critical missions, enabling a new era of data-driven intelligence and innovation. With 33 satellites launched to date, Kepler operates the first commercial optical data relay constellation, enabling real-time, continuous space communications while supporting advanced on-orbit compute and hosted payload capabilities. 

The Software Safety & Mission Assurance Specialist serves as the independent Software Assurance authority for one or more satellite programs, providing objective oversight of software products, development processes, suppliers, and verification activities throughout the program lifecycle.

This position integrates the disciplines traditionally associated with Software Product Assurance (SPA) and Software Quality Assurance (SQA) into a single engineering function responsible for ensuring software is developed, verified, and released in accordance with mission assurance objectives, customer requirements, and applicable industry standards.

Working independently from Software Engineering while partnering closely with Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, Product Assurance, Operations, and Program Management, the Software Safety & Mission Assurance Specialist provides independent technical assessment of software risk, verifies compliance with established processes and standards, and supports informed program decisions regarding software readiness for flight.

Key Responsibilities:

Software Product Assurance

• Develop, implement, and maintain the Software Product Assurance strategy throughout the software lifecycle

• Evaluate software requirements, design, implementation, verification, validation, and operational readiness for compliance with program and mission assurance requirements. Review architecture of the software

• Assess software safety, criticality reliability, security, maintainability, and configuration integrity using a risk-based approach

• Evaluate software contributions to system hazards and support software safety analyses including Software Hazard Analysis, STPA, FTA, and software criticality assessments

• Assess residual software risk and provide independent recommendations regarding software acceptance operational use

Software Quality Assurance

• Verify compliance with approved software development processes, quality management systems, customer requirements, and applicable industry standards

• Conduct independent process and product audits throughout the software lifecycle

• Verify implementation of peer reviews, configuration management, coding standards, testing, release controls, and defect management processes

• Monitor software quality metrics and trends to identify emerging risks and opportunities for continuous improvement

• Support corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), root cause investigations, and organizational process improvement initiatives

Verification, Validation & Test Oversight

• Assess software verification and validation strategies for completeness, independence, appropriate rigor, and traceability

• Review verification plans, procedures, coverage analyses, and test evidence

• Witness formal verification activities when required

• Verify that software anomalies are appropriately dispositioned prior to release

• Support Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) activities as applicable

Configuration & Change Assurance

• Participate as an independent member of Software Change Control Boards (CCBs)

• Evaluate the mission assurance impact of proposed software changes

• Verify configuration baseline integrity prior to formal software releases

• Assess software release readiness and configuration status accounting

Supplier Assurance

• Evaluate supplier software development processes and assurance activities

• Participate in supplier audits, technical reviews, and product evaluations

• Assess supplier compliance with contractual, regulatory, and mission assurance requirements

• Monitor supplier corrective actions and associated risk mitigation activities

Mission & Operational Assurance

• Support software acceptance, deployment, commissioning, and operational readiness

• Participate in anomaly investigations affecting flight or ground software

• Assess operational software trends, recurring defects, and mission impacts

• Support mission readiness reviews and post-flight lessons learned activities

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, or related technical discipline

• 7+ years of experience supporting software development within aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, or other safety-critical industries

• Experience with software development lifecycle processes and software verification and validation

• Experience performing software process audits, quality assessments, or assurance activities

• Working knowledge of software configuration management and change control

• Experience operating within regulated engineering environments

Bonus Points:

Experience supporting spacecraft, launch vehicle, satellite, or other spaceflight programsKnowledge of:

• ECSS-Q-ST-80

• ECSS-E-ST-40

• ECSS-Q-ST-20

• NPR 7150.2

• NASA-STD-8739.8

• NASA-STD-8719.13

Experience with:

• AS9100 or ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems

• Software Hazard Analysis

• STPA

• Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

• Software criticality analysis

• Software FMEA

• Agile software development in safety-critical environments

• DOORS, Jama, Polarion, Jira, Confluence, Git, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps

• SonarQube, Coverity, or equivalent static analysis tools