Engineering Lead - Prism

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company bringing the benefits of space to the masses through advanced communications technology. We are building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions such as national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. With a vertically integrated approach, Northwood designs, builds, and rapidly deploys scalable systems that power the next generation of space missions.

If you like solving complex challenges and seeing your work deployed around the world with real impact, Northwood is the place to do it. Role: Prism is our parabolic dish product line. We are looking for an Engineering Lead to own the software for it - the embedded software running on the antenna, the backend services that command and monitor it, and the interfaces between them. Most of the interesting work sits at the seam between embedded and the server side.

You would own both sides of it, and you would own how quickly a change can move across it: make the change, test it against real or simulated hardware, and integrate it with the control side without waiting on a trip to a site. Getting that loop faster is the thing we care most about here. You would own backend and embedded to start, and we expect the scope to grow into FPGA and other hardware-adjacent areas fairly quickly.

You would work closely with our FPGA leads from the start. As the team grows, FPGA engineers may end up reporting to you. We are not asking you to be an FPGA engineer - we want someone who can hold the whole design in their head and make good calls about what belongs in silicon, in firmware, and on the server. You would report to the Prism product owner and lead a team of 2-5 engineers to start and grow the team to 10+.

The size depends on how much of embedded ends up under your ownership, which is something we would work out with you during the process rather than decide in advance. Responsibilities: Own the Prism software end to end - embedded software on the antenna, the backend services that command and supervise it, and the contracts between them. Set the design direction across the embedded/backend seam: where state lives, what the control loops own, and how commands and telemetry are modeled.

Make the develop-test-integrate loop fast. Build the hardware-in-the-loop rigs, simulators, and test automation so that changes are exercised against real and simulated hardware before they reach a site. Own telemetry and automation for the product: what a dish reports and how often, how it is calibrated and health-checked, and how it detects and recovers from its own faults. Define and version the interface Prism exposes to the platform - tasking, telemetry, state, and diagnostics - and keep it stable enough for the Cloud team to build against.

Lead the team building it: set technical direction, mentor, review designs, and help grow the team as the scope expands. Work with FPGA, DSP, RF, and mechanical engineers on where functionality belongs, and what software needs to do • Work hands-on in the lab and at sites when integration needs it. Where This Role Ends Prism has an agreed boundary with the operational platform. The line sits at the platform code - how the network uses the system, rather than how the system works.

You own everything that makes a Prism dish a working, testable product: embedded software, device and control services, telemetry generation, calibration, fault detection and recovery, test rigs and simulation, and the versioned interface the platform commands it through. The Cloud team owns what turns many Prisms into a network: scheduling and orchestration, fleet configuration and rollout, network-wide state and observability, operator tooling, and the customer-facing APIs.

Other hardware product lines have their own leads. You own Prism's software, not all of Northwood's hardware software. The interface between you and Cloud is designed together