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Comment by slackpad | Hacker News Reader

It's cool to see so many people excited about this launch. Just wanted to remind people that we have a lot of software job openings right now. People are often surprised to learn that SpaceX is hiring web developers -http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/3890. There are some interesting internal tools projects that are critical parts of each mission. We have embedded developer, PM, and test roles open as well.

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I think working on software at SpaceX would be seriously cool, but for unrelated reasons now's not a good time for me to pursue such a dream. I do want to make a move to something like spaceflight eventually - sort of a childhood dream of mine. If I may ask, are there any open-source projects or other technologies you would recommend for someone to work on if they wanted to prepare for such a career a few years from now? Currently I work primarily with with distributed systems / Linux distributions if that affects your suggestions at all... I've heard from some other friends that Ada is a must-have and that Matlab's Simulink is the future - but they do government work exclusively, so I'm not sure how it compares to a "space startup" like you.

I don't think you need to learn Ada! Take a look at our Reddit AMA for some details about what we use - http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap. There are a lot of different paths people have taken to get to the software team here, so a strong background with open source on some meaty distributed systems projects in Linux sounds like a good starting point.

What about janitors? I'm sure I could clean up the poop!

I think I'm the reverse of (Gattaca) Ethan Hawke in this situation.

The fact that SpaceX is hiring web developers is not surprising per-se.

The fact that it is a 'frontend' position and that page says it's 'avionics' - that is surprising indeed.

I think there might actually be a bit of a scope for some public-side web development that interfaces (indirectly!) with the avionics. Some other launch providers do animations based on vehicle telemetry once the vehicle is out of range. Last night, SpaceX just showed a static image. Given that there's a lot of interest in their webcasts, I imagine they'd like to do better at some point...

[Edit: kind-of wonder if they're using a certain amount of in-house webapp stuff for mission planning, etc., as well]

Yeah, I did expect to see some telemetry. At least, the orbital parameters.

SpaceX should just provide an API for that, we'll build the rest ;)

You could always try to use an antenna and software defined radio to pull the telemetry directly if nearby a launch site. Probably encrypted though :(

I think most other providers feed telemetry into STK (http://www.agi.com/) to get the animations. There really isn't that much effort involved if using STK.

I'd LOVE to work for SpaceX, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in Hawthorne California...

I don't think a lot of SpaceX employees actually live in Hawthorne. Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, El Segundo, etc.

From the glassdoor.com reviews, its long hours and you're paid undermarket (which is fine if you want to work there, you're probably there because you want to work on something cool).

I applied to their Director of Infrastructure position having 14 years of IT experience managing people and large infrastructure and was told I was under qualified. YMMV.

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