Senior Software Engineer - Hardware Test at Astranis
San Francisco, CA
$150,000–$215,000
Jul 1, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior engineering role focused on building and maintaining software infrastructure for satellite hardware testing. Day-to-day work involves designing reusable, scalable test code, integrating ground control and telemetry software, and collaborating with electrical, flight software, and ground software teams to validate flight components across all stages of development. Suits engineers with a background in Python, Linux, and hands-on hardware debugging.
Senior level · 5+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Bachelor's required · Full-time
Pay in the description: $150,000–$215,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 530 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software quality assurance analysts and testers). range 400–690
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $137,591 (middle half $99,460–$171,745). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role sits at the intersection of test engineering and software development: it requires designing software architecture, building automated test infrastructure, and implementing ground control/telemetry software — all of which lean toward 15-1252 Software Developers. However, the explicit framing as a 'Hardware Test Engineer' with a focus on test plans, validation of flight components, and test campaign infrastructure makes 15-1253 the primary classification, with 15-1252 as a close runner-up.
Python is listed with '2+ years' under Requirements alongside a substitution qualifier ('or other high-level object oriented scripting language(s)'). The alternatives field captures common OO scripting peers; the requirement itself is a hard gate.
Version control is listed as a hard requirement with Git named first; Mercurial and SVN are explicitly named alternatives.
Web development frameworks and databases appear only under the 'Bonus' section and are therefore preferred, not required.
The posting requires U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residency, or refugee/asylee status for ITAR compliance — this is not a security clearance gate, so the clearance requirement is set to None.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelors, degree in CS, EE (or equivalent background knowledge)'. The parenthetical 'equivalent background knowledge' could be read as accepting non-degree candidates; however, the primary framing is a degree requirement, so Bachelors is set. Hiring managers should confirm whether equivalent experience is genuinely accepted.
Hardware-adjacent skills (reading schematics, debugging circuits, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes) are listed under Requirements but name no specific software tool or platform, so they are omitted from the skills list per extraction rules.
Read the full posting
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