Senior Software Engineer - Tasking and Planning

Job description

ROLE HIGHLIGHTS: • Senior Software Engineer - Tasking and Planning • Location: Valencia, Spain • Department: Ground Segment • Reports to: Engineering Manager • Employment type: Permanent • Workplace model: Hybrid (3 days per week in office) • Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required) WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS: As Senior Software Engineer on the Acquisition Planning team, you will build the software systems that enable ICEYE and its customers to task satellites, plan data acquisitions, and turn orbital mechanics into operational intelligence capability. From pass prediction and coverage computation engines to event-driven backend services and the engineering interfaces that let users visualise and de-conflict collection plans, you will own the stack end-to-end — working directly alongside engineers and product managers with deep operational backgrounds to understand what users need and ship software that delivers it. This is an early-stage, high-autonomy role where you will help define the architecture and direction of a platform that sits at the intersection of software engineering, applied mathematics, and real-world intelligence operations. WHO WE ARE ICEYE delivers space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to governments and allied nations. This includes sovereign and turnkey ISR missions leveraging ICEYE’s world-leading synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology, as well as access to data from the world’s largest SAR satellite constellation. These capabilities enable partners to detect and respond to critical changes anywhere on Earth with unprecedented speed and accuracy, day or night and in any weather, supported by ultra high-resolution imagery and high-frequency revisits. As a trusted partner for defense, intelligence, security, and maritime domain awareness, ICEYE’s near real-time data creates a tactical advantage for mission-critical operations. Designed for dual use, the platform also serves civil protection and commercial users for natural-catastrophe intelligence, insurance, maritime monitoring including oil-spill detection, and finance, contributing to global security and community resilience. ICEYE is headquartered in Finland and operates globally across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We have more than 900 employees, united by a shared vision: improving life on Earth by becoming the global source of truth in Earth Observation. YOUR DAY-TO-DAY RESPONSIBILITIES - Tasking and Planning Engines. Orbit propagation, pass prediction, acquisition geometry, sensor configuration parameters, and coverage footprint computation. Applied science mathematics turned into operational capability via Software. - Platform Services. Backend services handling task management. Event-driven workers performing opportunity calculation and synchronising state asynchronously via NATS JetStream. PostgreSQL for persistence. Responsiveness and resilience at the service of the mission. - Engineering Interfaces. Robust and evolvable APIs and UIs that enable engineers to visualise passes, compare collection plans, plan tasks, and self-service their access to space. - Whatever the future brings. Multi-sensor coordination, processing pipeline integration, new collection strategies, and capabilities that will emerge from close collaboration with users. You will help define the direction, not just execute it. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Must haves: - Strong software engineering fundamentals. You design decoupled, maintainable, resilient, performant systems. You can reason about concurrency and how transactions work. You know about CAP and regularly make deliberate trade-offs between Consistency and Availability. You understand the difference between “At most once”, “At least once” and how to design systems around those guarantees. - Fluency with AI-assisted engineering. You treat AI as a standard part of your toolkit, not a novelty or a threat. You use it across the whole of your work (design exploration, code, tests, documentation, debugging, reviewing unfamiliar codebases) and you have a feel for where it accelerates you and where it quietly costs you time. Crucially, you stay accountable for the output: you know how to prompt and scope a task well, how to verify what comes back, and how to keep the guarantees that production demands. You are curious about improving the way you and your team work with these tools, and you help others get better at it. - Production experience. You have designed, built, and operated services in production: REST APIs, relational databases, and asynchronous workers. You know how to make your systems observable and resilient. You understand what production demands beyond making things work locally. - Fast learner in technical domains. This role involves orbital mechanics, RF physics, and geospatial data. You don’t need to come in knowing these — but you do ne