---
title: 'Flight Software Engineer at Matter Intelligence'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/flight-software-engineer-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-rjgkyr0v1n9n'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Flight Software Engineer at Matter Intelligence

- **Company:** Matter Intelligence
- **Location:** El Segundo, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/matter-intelligence/a7b5c7d0-1eda-49b2-9a62-987d4a0e11a7

## Job description

## ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Flight Software Engineer with strong software fundamentals, real embedded or flight software experience, and the judgment to build robust systems under practical constraints. This role sits close to the hardware and close to the mission: you will help define how onboard systems collect data, manage resources, handle failures, and move information from sensor to storage to downlink.

In this role, you will work across the full stack of flight software, from low-level interfaces and concurrency primitives to application-level services and end-to-end test infrastructure. You will be expected to reason clearly about trade-offs, debug across hardware and software boundaries, and build systems that are simple enough to trust when the environment gets messy.

As an early member of the team, you will also help shape the engineering culture around flight software: how we write interfaces, test behavior, document assumptions, review designs, and balance first-principles rigor with pragmatic execution.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

You will build and maintain the software that enables Matter’s sensing systems to operate reliably in constrained, real-world environments. The work spans embedded Linux, onboard data handling, hardware interfaces, concurrency, fault handling, test infrastructure, and integration with broader mission systems.

You will collaborate closely with hardware, avionics, science, and data teams to turn ambiguous requirements into clear designs and production-quality implementations. You will help create software that can be exercised in simulation, validated in hardware-in-the-loop environments, and trusted as the system matures toward flight.

- Design, implement, and maintain flight software services for sensing payload operations, onboard data handling, resource management, and system coordination
- Build robust interfaces to hardware and lower-level systems, including drivers, protocol integrations, and debugging tools when needed
- Develop software for embedded Linux environments, including Jetson-class devices and constrained compute targets
- Reason carefully about concurrency, bounded memory, performance, and failure modes in systems where correctness and operational safety matter
- Build and improve data paths for collection, compression, storage, and downlink, balancing throughput, latency, reliability, and power constraints
- Partner with hardware and avionics teams to debug hardware/software interactions and bring up new system capabilities
- Use simulation, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop testing appropriately to validate behavior at the right level of fidelity
- Improve build, test, and release workflows, including reproducible builds, automated testing, static and dynamic analysis, and artifact traceability
- Write clean interfaces, useful explanatory comments, and design documentation that make the system easier for future teammates to understand and extend

## WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

You have professional experience building flight software, embedded systems, or similarly constrained software where reliability, debuggability, and performance matter. You are comfortable working close to the hardware, but you also care about higher-level architecture, maintainability, and the developer experience of the systems around you.

You can debug across the full stack: hardware interfaces, threads and processes, filesystems, compression, protocols, and test infrastructure. You know when to reach for simulation, when to move to hardware, and how to use both without fooling yourself.

You communicate well across disciplines and can work with hardware, software, and science teammates to resolve integration challenges. You are proactive about unblocking issues, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and making thoughtful trade-offs under time pressure.

A few things we expect in this role:

- 2–6+ years of professional flight software, embedded software, or closely related systems experience
- Strong programming skills in Python and either C++ or Rust
- Experience with multi-threading, memory management, performance optimization, and constrained-system design
- Hands-on experience with build systems such as CMake or Make, cross-compilation toolchains, and embedded Linux
- Experience with low-level communication protocols, hardware/software debugging, and fault-tolerant system design
- Strong instincts for testing, reproducibility, observability, and clean software interfaces
- Comfort reasoning about concurrency trade-offs, including bounded memory, locking strategies, lock-free approaches, and static analysis
- Judgment when using AI-assisted coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor, with an emphasis on reducing technical debt rather than accelerating it
- A first-principles approach to problem solving, with the pragmatism to ship robust solutions instead of waiting for perfect ones

## NICE TO HAVE

These are not required, but they are strong signals you will ramp quickly and have outsized impact:

- Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, automated test systems, static or dynamic analysis workflows, and artifact traceability, especially in GitLab
- Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation infrastructure, or fidelity-based test strategies for embedded or flight systems
- Experience architecting onboard data paths under real-world constraints, including filesystems, compression, buffering, downlink, latency, throughput, and power budgets
- Proven ownership of projects from requirements through design, implementation, test, deployment, and operational support
- Experience working with sensors, payload systems, avionics, robotics, satellites, aerospace systems, or other hardware-rich environments
- Genuine curiosity about geospatial systems, sensing, and building software with real-world physical impact

## ABOUT MATTER

Matter is building sensor infrastructure to read the Earth’s material fingerprint from orbit, turning previously inaccessible data into critical intelligence for industries like agriculture, mining, insurance, resource management, and environmental monitoring. We are revealing a layer of detail about the planet that has never been seen before.

Founded by engineers and scientists with deep NASA/JPL roots, Matter combines meticulous, first-principles science with the speed, ownership, and practical focus of an early-stage startup. Our work spans hardware, sensing, flight software, data infrastructure, and AI systems, and the software we build must hold up across the full path from collection through customer-facing insight.

This role sits close to the core of the mission. You will work with people across hardware, science, and software, and your work will shape how reliably we can collect data, operate payload systems, and learn from the physical world.

## WHY THIS ROLE

This is a rare chance to build foundational flight software for a sensing system that has to work outside the comfort of ordinary production environments. The constraints are real, the feedback loops are hands-on, and the quality bar matters.

You will have meaningful ownership over architecture, implementation, and test strategy in a fast-moving environment. You will help define how Matter builds reliable flight software: how we structure services, validate behavior, handle failure, and make the system understandable to the people who operate and extend it.

If you’re excited about building robust software close to the hardware, working across disciplines, and helping create a new way to understand the physical world, we’d love to talk.

## About Matter Intelligence

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Matter Intelligence builds a new vision ecosystem pairing the world’s first ultraspectral sensor with a foundational Large World Model that understands the physical world at a molecular level.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – $12M raised)
- **Headquarters**: El Segundo, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Vishnu Sridhar (CEO), Nathan Stein (Co-Founder and Founding Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Space Research and Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Imaging/Sensors
- **Target customers**: B2B – autonomous systems manufacturers, infrastructure monitoring firms, defense/space agencies, insurance, and robotics companies.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Giving machines the ability to take actions with superintelligence” by bridging visual pattern recognition with physics-based reasoning.

## Products & Services
- **Ultraspectral Sensor**: Captures thousands of spectral bands from ultraviolet to thermal infrared, revealing unique molecular fingerprints of materials. Not just higher resolution – an entirely different kind of never-captured information.
- **Large World Model (foundational AI)**: Combines physics-informed learning with sensor data to identify materials with chemical precision, predict system failures, and enable robots to safely handle objects.
- **Geospatial AI Platform**: Accelerates computer vision and contextual geospatial modeling for understanding and predicting real-world events from space to surface.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $12M (Seed round, October 2024)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lowercarbon Capital (lead seed), International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (non-equity assistance), and six other seed investors.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 230% YoY to ~29 employees (as of mid-2025).
  - Active job postings: 15 (monthly +7.1%, quarterly +25%).
  - LinkedIn followers grew 170% yearly.
  - Opened offices in San Francisco and El Segundo, CA.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-of-its-kind ultraspectral sensor** that captures chemical and material properties, not just shapes/colors.
- **Physics-informed AI** (Large World Model) that understands matter at a molecular level – a deep moat in computer vision and remote sensing.
- **Strong ties to NASA JPL** (7 employees from JPL) and other top talent sources (UCLA, Harvard, Palantir, Millennium Space Systems).

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the sensor-hardware production, maturing the AI foundation model, and expanding into frontier customer deployments (autonomous systems, infrastructure monitoring, defense, insurance).
- **Direction for growth**: Building the “vision infrastructure” for machines – from satellites to robots – enabling superintelligent perception of the physical world.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: In-office work environment (San Francisco and El Segundo). Emphasis on cutting-edge R&D at the intersection of hardware, optics, and AI. Small, fast-growing team with direct impact.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: In-Office (on-site required) per Built In and LinkedIn.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Work on frontier technology that “gives machines superintelligence.” Team includes former NASA JPL, Palantir, and DroneDeploy engineers. Strong focus on delivery and real-world deployment. Early-stage equity opportunity.

## Sources
1. [matter.com](https://www.matter.com/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/matter-intelligence](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/matter-intelligence)
3. [linkedin.com/company/matter-intelligence](https://www.linkedin.com/company/matter-intelligence)
4. [builtin.com/company/matter-intelligence](https://builtin.com/company/matter-intelligence)

## Other roles at Matter Intelligence

- [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-matter-intelligence-san-francisco-5cyssfxk3ggd) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Commercial Business](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-commercial-business-matter-intelligence-san-francisco-h38ghve2r6m5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Testbed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/testbed-engineer-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-887p2x46b78n) — El Segundo, CA
- [Data/ML Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/data-ml-infrastructure-engineer-matter-intelligence-san-francisco-95yvbmf31y9h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-9rxkh6mx3nb5) — El Segundo, CA
- [Hyperspectral UAV Pilot](https://feeny.ai/job/hyperspectral-uav-pilot-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-xj5kmm81h7s8) — El Segundo, CA
- [Senior Geospatial Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-geospatial-scientist-matter-intelligence-san-francisco-bwwp128ybfgk) — San Francisco, CA
- [Early Career Test Engineer - Sensors](https://feeny.ai/job/early-career-test-engineer-sensors-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-fwtzt27j47c1) — El Segundo, CA
- [Senior Opto Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-opto-mechanical-engineer-matter-intelligence-el-segundo-zds563pt04a4) — El Segundo, CA
- [Product Researcher  - Insurance](https://feeny.ai/job/product-researcher-insurance-matter-intelligence-san-francisco-gadtq64c1err) — San Francisco, CA