At Umbra, a Software Engineer plays a critical role in bridging the gap between space-based hardware and ground-based utility. The company is pioneering next-generation Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite technology, which allows for high-resolution earth imaging regardless of weather or light conditions. As a software engineer, you will design, build, and maintain the highly specialized systems that command these satellites, process massive streams of radar data, and deliver imagery to customers with minimal latency.

Your work directly impacts the viability of Umbra's primary business model. Whether you are working on the Order and Delivery team to streamline how clients request and download imagery, or the Command & Control team to ensure secure, reliable communication with orbiting spacecraft, your code is part of a complex aerospace ecosystem. This is not a typical web development environment; it requires solving unique challenges around data scale, real-time telemetry processing, and highly specific domain architectures.

The engineering organization at Umbra values pragmatic, high-performing software that can handle the rigorous demands of space operations. Engineers must build systems that are both resilient to the harsh realities of hardware communication and flexible enough to adapt to rapid business growth. It is a highly collaborative environment where software, radar, and aerospace specialists work hand-in-hand to redefine what is possible in earth observation.

The following questions are representative of what you can expect during the Umbra interviewing process. These questions are drawn from real candidate experiences and are designed to highlight key patterns in how the company evaluates technical competency and professional background.

Work Experience & Project Deep Dives

This category focuses on your past achievements, architectural decisions, and how you navigate complex project requirements.

• Walk me through a complex software system you designed and deployed. What were the trade-offs you made?
• Describe a time when you had to work with a highly specific or unfamiliar technology stack. How did you get up to speed?

To succeed in the Umbra interview process, you must prepare to demonstrate both deep technical expertise and strong collaborative skills. The company operates in a highly specialized domain, meaning your ability to adapt to niche technologies is just as important as your foundational software engineering skills.

Technical Specialization – You must show a deep understanding of your primary development languages and system design principles. Be ready to discuss how you write clean, maintainable, and highly performant code, particularly in backend or systems-level environments.

Architectural Soundness – You will be evaluated on your ability to design scalable systems that interface with complex hardware and data pipelines. Focus your preparation on distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure patterns.

Collaborative Resilience – Because Umbra's engineering teams are cross-functional, you need to show that you can communicate effectively with radar scientists, hardware engineers, and product managers. Be prepared to explain complex technical concepts in a clear, accessible manner.

Domain Adaptability – While prior aerospace experience is highly valued, showing a strong aptitude for learning complex, domain-specific technologies (such as orbital mechanics, radar processing, or geospatial standards) is crucial for candidates coming from traditional tech backgrounds.

The interview process at Umbra is designed to evaluate both your immediate technical capabilities and your long-term fit within the engineering organization. Candidates can expect a structured journey that transitions from high-level screenings to deep-dive conversations about their past work and engineering philosophy.

The process typically begins with an HR screening call. During this initial conversation, the recruiter will go through a checklist of technical skills and qualifications to ensure your background aligns with the role's basic requirements. While this conversation may feel structured and checklist-heavy, it is a critical gatekeeping step where you should clearly highlight your experience with the specific technologies mentioned in the job description.

Following a successful screen, you will move on to interviews with hiring managers or program managers. These rounds are often conversational and focus heavily on sharing your past work experiences, project achievements, and architectural decisions. Rather than facing intense, abstract coding puzzles right away, you will be asked to walk through real-world scenarios you have encountered. However, candidates should be prepared for a comprehensive process; some reports indicate that the later stages can involve multiple rounds where you may address similar architectural or behavioral questions with different stakeholders to ensure team alignment.

The timeline above represents the typical progression a candidate goes through during the evaluation process. Use this visual guide to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time to review both your high-level project narratives and your deep technical competencies. Keep in mind that the exact number of rounds can vary depending on the seniority of the role and the specific team you are joining.

To excel at Umbra, you must understand the specific areas where interviewers will focus their evaluation. Because the engineering challenges here span both space and ground systems, the expectations are highly aligned with reliability, performance, and domain integration.

Order and Delivery Pipelines

This area evaluates your ability to build the customer-facing and backend systems that handle the distribution of massive SAR datasets. Strong performance means demonstrating an understanding of high-throughput data transfer, secure API design, and cloud-native architectures.

Be ready to go over:

• API Design – Creating robust, self-documenting REST or gRPC APIs that can handle complex querying and ordering of geospatial data.
• Cloud Infrastructure – Utilizing services (typically AWS) to build scalable, serverless, or containerized pipelines that handle heavy processing workloads.
• Data Serialization & Storage – Efficiently storing and transferring large raster datasets and metadata.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Geospatial indexing (e.g., H3, S2 geometry) and cloud-optimized data formats (e.g., Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs).

Example scenarios:

• Designing a system that allows customers to query available satellite imagery over a specific geographic bounding box and download it securely.
• Handling a sudden spike in concurrent download requests for multi-gigabyte files without degrading system performance.

Command & Control (C&C) Systems

For engineers working closer to the spacecraft, this area tests your ability to write highly reliable software that communicates with satellites. This requires an uncompromising focus on system safety, state management, and low-level protocols.

Be ready to go over:

• State Machine Design – Building deterministic software that can safely transition satellites through various operational modes.
• Telemetry Processing – Parsing, validating, and storing real-time data streams from spacecraft systems.
• Error Handling and Recovery – Designing systems that can gracefully handle network drops, corrupted data packets, and hardware failures.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Spacecraft communication protocols (e.g., CCSDS standards) and flight software integration.

Example scenarios:

• Designing a terrestrial gateway that queue-up commands to be uplinked to a satellite during a brief ground station pass.
• Implementing a validation engine that prevents malformed or dangerous commands from being sent to physical hardware.

Ground Software & Radar Integration

This area sits between the raw radar hardware and the user applications. It focuses on the software that controls ground stations and processes raw radar signals into usable imagery.

Be ready to go over:

• Systems Programming – Writing high-performance code (often in languages like C++, Rust, or Go) to handle real-time signal processing pipelines.
• Hardware Interfacing – Developing software that interacts directly with software-defined radars (SDRs), antennas, and ground station hardware.
• Concurrency & Parallelism – Maximizing hardware utilization to process massive data streams in parallel.

Example scenarios:

• Optimizing a data ingestion pipeline to prevent packet loss when receiving raw radar data from a high-rate downlink antenna.
• Structuring a multi-threaded application to process radar signals while maintaining a responsive control interface.

As a Software Engineer at Umbra, your day-to-day responsibilities will vary depending on your specific team, but they will center around the development of highly reliable, mission-critical systems.

On the Order and Delivery team, you will focus on building the APIs, microservices, and cloud infrastructure that power the commercial side of the business. You will write clean, scalable backend code to process customer orders, orchestrate the scheduling of satellite tasks, and manage the automated delivery of processed imagery. This involves working closely with product managers and frontend engineers to ensure a seamless, reliable user experience.

If you are on the Command & Control or Ground Software teams, your responsibilities will lean closer to the hardware and operations. You will develop software that monitors satellite health, automates ground station contacts, and processes raw telemetry. You will collaborate daily with spacecraft operators, thermal engineers, and radar systems specialists to ensure that the software perfectly matches the physical capabilities and constraints of the satellites. Regardless of your team, writing comprehensive tests, participating in rigorous code reviews, and maintaining detailed system documentation are core components of your daily routine.

Umbra looks for engineers who combine strong computer science fundamentals with a practical, hands-on approach to system building. Because of the specialized nature of the work, requirements are often strict regarding technical depth and experience levels.

• Experience Level – Senior positions typically require 5 to 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade systems.
• Technical Stack – Deep proficiency in backend languages such as Go, Python, C++, or Rust is highly valued. Strong experience with cloud platforms (especially AWS), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and database systems (SQL and NoSQL) is expected.
• Domain Knowledge – For systems and ground software roles, a background in aerospace, satellite operations, GIS (Geospatial Information Systems), or signal processing is a major differentiator.
• Soft Skills – Excellent communication skills are essential. You must be able to collaborate effectively across highly diverse engineering disciplines and explain software constraints to non-software stakeholders.

Must-Have Skills

• Strong backend systems design experience, particularly with microservices and distributed architectures.
• Proficiency in at least one modern, high-performance programming language.
• Experience building and deploying scalable applications on cloud infrastructure.
• A disciplined approach to testing, continuous integration, and system observability.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience working with geospatial data formats and libraries (e.g., GDAL, Rasterio, shapely).
• Prior experience in the aerospace, defense, or satellite imaging industries.
• Familiarity with real-time systems, network protocols, or hardware-in-the-loop testing.