Staff Software Engineer (IR Data Products)

Join Muon, a company focused on revolutionizing the way we understand and interact with our planet. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of our IR Data Products team. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives to design and build scalable software architectures, optimize low-latency processing, and establish MLOps foundations. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact in the field of geospatial data and machine learning.

• Lead the architectural direction and implementation of scalable software architectures for IR data systems, ensuring they are fast, reliable, and ready for many-satellite scale.
• Own key aspects of the technical roadmap to low-latency processing, including structural designs such as event-driven microservices and cloud infrastructure design.
• Build the production foundations for ML products, including model packaging, experiment tracking, and GPU-backed training and inference, to support derived-product work.

• The ideal candidate is a hands-on staff-level engineer with a track record of leading multi-quarter architectural initiatives on production data platforms at scale
• They combine deep experience with distributed data systems and modern workflow orchestration with real geospatial and (ideally) MLOps depth, and they are as comfortable writing a design document and driving cross-team alignment as they are debugging a complex piece of algorithm code
• Experience with latency optimization: measurement discipline, benchmarking, per-stage instrumentation, right-sizing, fan-out, caching, async I/O, and knowing when the answer is structural rather than algorithmic
• Strong operational mindset: observability, SLOs, on-call, safe deploys, hotfix protocols, immutability, and reproducibility
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating production data pipelines on AWS with a modern workflow orchestrator (e.g., Flyte, Airflow, Prefect, Argo, or equivalent)
• Excellent technical writing and cross-functional communication — comfortable driving alignment across engineers, scientists, PMs, and adjacent platform / flight-software teams
• Bachelor’s degree with 10+ years or MS with 8+ years or PhD with 5+ years of software engineering experience
• Demonstrated success as a technical leader on production data platforms at scale — with the designs and rollouts to show for it
• Track record of leading multi-quarter architectural initiatives that spanned multiple services or teams
• We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check all the boxes, and we look forward to reviewing your application!
• Applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157
• Experience with event-driven / microservices architectures: queues, event routing, backpressure, idempotency, retries, DLQs, and clear service contracts
• Terraform / IaC ownership of AWS resources, and hands-on experience shaping IAM boundaries between environments
• Familiarity with modern workflow platforms such as / Flyte v2
• Prior work on geospatial / remote sensing systems at scale
• Fluent with the tradeoffs behind geospatial storage formats, tile stores, and STAC
• Hands-on MLOps experience: model packaging and versioning, experiment tracking (MLflow, W&B, or similar), GPU-backed training and inference, feature stores, A/B harnesses
• Experience with GPU acceleration for image processing (e.g., JAX, CuPy, CUDA) or ML inference at scale
• Experience in satellite ground-segment or a comparable domain where compliance, provenance, and data lineage are first-class concerns
• Experience introducing latency SLOs and benchmarking discipline to a team
• Prior experience serving imagery / tiled geospatial data to external customers or partner platforms