Embedded C Software Engineer for Space Exploration

Embedded C Software Engineer

Guildford / Hybrid

Standard 8 Systems is working with an engineering team building embedded software for spacecraft and low-orbit systems. These are real-time platforms, flying in genuinely hostile conditions, the kind of environment where you think NASA, you think SpaceX and you're in the right territory.

This isn't app-layer work wearing an embedded label. You'll write C close to the metal: hardware interfaces, tight timing constraints, comms protocols, real-time behaviour, and the integration problems that only show up once hardware and software meet. When the thing you built is in orbit, there's no patching it next sprint, so the bar is high and nobody's cutting corners.

You'll sit inside a multidisciplinary team where software, electronics, systems and mission delivery all overlap. It moves fast, and the standard stays high, because the software has to hold up when it actually counts.

The role

You'll develop embedded C for mission-critical systems and own it end to end: design it, build it, test it, integrate it, support it once it's flying. The focus is robust, low-level software that talks directly to hardware. Day to day that's reading technical requirements, working out how the system genuinely behaves, writing clean C, debugging the integration problems nobody else wants to touch, all inside a structured engineering process.

Day to day

• Writing embedded C for real-time and low-level systems
• Developing software that interfaces directly with hardware
• Working in RTOS and/or bare-metal environments
• Contributing to requirements definition, software design and implementation
• Debugging timing, interface and integration issues
• Working with communication protocols such as CAN, serial and IP networking
• Building Python scripts and tools for testing, automation or support
• Taking software through review, verification and system-level testing
• Working closely with electronics, systems and hardware engineers
• Keeping delivery moving without cutting corners on engineering quality

What you'll need

• Strong commercial experience developing embeddedsoftware in C
• Good understanding of real-time software development
• Experience with RTOS or bare-metal systems such as VxWorks, RT Linux, FreeRTOS or similar
• Solid knowledge of low-level software and hardware interaction
• Experience working within structured software development processes
• Python for scripting, tooling, test automation or diagnostics
• Familiarity with interfaces and protocols such as CAN, UART, SPI, I2C, Ethernet or IP networking
• Comfortable with modern version control and collaborative development workflows
• Able to work pragmatically in a fast-moving engineering environment

Useful background

• Digital electronics knowledge
• Experience with ARM, SPARC, RISC-V or similar processor architectures
• Previous work in aerospace, defence, robotics, automotive, space, industrial systems or another safety or mission-critical domain