Backend Engineering Intern: Ground Platform Control Loft Orbital
Standardized satellite platform for fast and reliable low Earth orbit missions.
Internship
Toulouse
No remote
Salary: Not specified
Skills we're looking for
Communication skills
Mentoring
FastAPI
Slack
Flask
+3
You'll be part of
303 employees
Aeronautics / Space
Founded in 2017
65%
35%
We’re Making Space Simple: Loft is a space infrastructure company that provides simple, fast, and reliable ways to deploy missions to low Earth orbit.
We have developed a standardized satellite platform that can be configured to fly any customer mission. With our own hardware and software abstraction layers on top of a commodity satellite bus, our platform is truly turnkey and plug-and-play.
Loft offers our customers unbeatable speed-to-orbit by removing the non-recurring engineering that is the root cause of schedule unpredictability and cost overruns. We bypass typical aerospace lead times by maintaining an inventory of fully assembled satellite platforms at our Integration and Test facility in Golden, CO.
Loft handles all elements of the process of deploying and operating space infrastructure on the customer’s behalf, so that customers can focus their time and resources entirely on their mission.
You'll be working on
Wanna join the adventure?
Loft Orbital is looking for a Backend Engineering Intern to join our Ground Platform, Control Team. The Control team owns the backend services that let Loft operators and customers command, monitor, and automate our satellite fleet through Cockpit, our mission control system. You'll help build and scale the microservices that sit between ground and flight software, turning high-level intent into safe, reliable on-orbit operations. Our team sits in the middle of Flight Software, Satellite Operations, and Test teams, giving you the chance to learn about the full end-to-end systems that go into launching and operating a satellite mission. If you're excited about building backend systems that directly control satellites — and you like the idea of both shipping code and helping fly missions — we'd love to hear from you.
Location: Toulouse office, city center (Jeanne d’Arc metro station)
Duration: 6-month, end-of-studies internship — target start date: early 2027.
About this role:
Your task will be to design and develop a control investigation API which will assist operators with investigations and enable the automation of standard investigations into failed commanding and lack of telemetry. This will be a valuable step towards reliable and scalable operations of our fleet. The project will require you to work closely with our satellite operators to learn about common failure cases, as well as our space infrastructure, to understand how it can best be used to automate investigations.
Must Haves:
- An engineering background (e.g. Computer Science, Physics, Aerospace) with a desire to do back-end software engineering.
- Python experience.
- Comfortable working in English: the Control team works across the US and France, so it's essential you can communicate well in English.
- A desire to work in a diverse, international team.
- Good communication skills.
- Experience with Docker and container-based development.
- Knowledge of space systems and/or an understanding of satellite operations.
- Hands-on experience with backend web development frameworks (e.g., Django, Flask, FastAPI, etc.).
- Database fundamentals.
- Knowledge of front-end engineering practices and frameworks.
- Gratification: €1,300 gross/month.
- Lunch vouchers (tickets restaurant), because let's be honest, we love food! (we even have a Slack channel about it: #loft-gourmand)
- Sustainable mobility package (forfait mobilité durable).
- A genuinely international environment comprising 20+ different nationalities.
- A genuine mentoring program to support you on a daily basis throughout the internship.
Benefits
Key figures
In short
Founding year
2017
Employees
303
Gender
35%
65%