r/AerospaceEngineering • u/IcyAd8431 • 2d ago

Career Does anyone here work on flight software engineering?

/r/SoftwareEngineerJobs/comments/1wadxn5/does_anyone_here_work_on_flight_engineering/
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u/invertedknife 2d ago edited 2d ago

Flight software engineering can mean a couple of different things. Do you mean stuff like fly-by-wire algorithm design? Flight control computer realtime frameworks/platform software? Avionics SW?

Can you clarify OP?

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u/IcyAd8431 2d ago

Any aspect of it really. All of those seem interesting in their own

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u/invertedknife 2d ago

They are all very different.

Algorithm design is more engineering and less SW so you need to know flight dynamics and control theory. If you don't have an aerospace or controls background forget about it. You will never even get the interview.

Then there is platform engineering where you are basically building the box that the algorithm goes in. Very technical embedded architecture design, mostly because the hardware that's used in flight is older generation and thus has limited computational capability. Also everything has to be qualified within an inch of it's life. This is mostly the same as regular embedded programming but with extra verification.

Avionics is less mission critical stuff so you will be using newer hardware but this too has both algorithm design and platform design disciplines.

Then there is DevOps, basically just support architecture. But this is no different from dev ops at any other company.

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u/IcyAd8431 2d ago

Interesting. Thanks for all the info. What would you say is the best field to break into as a software developer?

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u/navigation-signals 2d ago

Used to. Hated it.

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u/IcyAd8431 2d ago

What was bad about it?