I’m having a heck of a time finding, much less hiring, SDETs to fill my open Ground Systems and Platforms SDET positions. My gut tells me that the job descriptions just aren’t exciting enough to get people’s attention. What does a “Ground Systems SDET” do? What “Platform”?
Lets see if I can’t explain them a bit better.
Talk-To-A-Satellite SDET
Ground systems refer to all of the hardware and software components here on the ground that work together to talk to a satellite in orbit. That’s everything from the software the satellite operators use to issue high-level commands, to the systems that relay that information to our ground stations around the world, to the services on the ground station that control and task the radio chain, to the services that move the antennas, to the entire telemetry pipeline back to the missions operations center allowing the operators to know the health of the satellite and ground system components.
Everything that goes to the satellite or comes from it goes through our ground systems. These systems have to work reliably to support our growing constellation.
Making sure they all work together is where the Ground Systems SDET comes in. You’re the first line of defense in making sure that all the awesome code our devs are slinging actually cling together and make a functional system. You get to play with our satellite-on-the-table (aka: Flatsat) in our staging environment to make sure what is being built works, and then see that be deployed to our production systems and task Pathfinder-1 (and soon Pathfinder-2!) in space.
If that sounds interesting and you either live or are willing to relocate to Seattle, WA, take a look at the Ground Systems SDET position and toss me your resume!
Satellite-Picture-Selling SDET
We’ve taken all of these pictures of the Earth from space, how do we sell them to people? Well, you need an intuitive interface for customers to see all of the images you have in your catalog, buy them, and task new pictures to be taken. That’s our Platform that ends up tasking the satellites in space through our ground systems.
There are a lot of factors in play when you start talking about satellite imagery. How cloudy was it when the picture was taken? What angle was the picture taken at? Where, exactly, was the picture and how does it map onto the earth? When was it taken? Is the customer allowed to see an image over this country?
And you can’t just show them a grid view of the images. You need to place those images onto an interface that makes sense, such as a map of the Earth, and oriented such that they align up correctly.
The interface needs to scale with the ever-growing number of users as well as the ever-growing number of images in the catalog. It also needs to have good access time to our customers around the globe while maintaining security restrictions on what geographies have access to what images.
Making sure all of this works is the role of the Platform SDET. As the devs craft javascript and RESTful backend code at a break-neck speed, you’re the one that ensures cohesion and functionality. Oh sure, their new gee-whiz feature looks great in demos, but how does it scale? What did they break adding that new feature? You’re one of the first to see new images from the satellite as they make their way into our catalog and enable customers to fully realize the power of our satellite constellation.
Interested? If you live in the Herndon, VA area or are willing to relocate, take a look at our Platform SDET position and apply!
Digital Ramblings 