About Loon
Loon is on a mission to connect people everywhere by inventing and integrating audacious technology. Loon is built on a sophisticated system of products and services that combine advancements in materials science, atmospheric modeling, machine learning, and communications systems. These platforms enable Loon to harness the stratosphere, transforming global connectivity and creating endless possibilities for new applications by bridging ground, sky and space.
Overview
Loon’s network orchestration stack is a Temporospatial Software-Defined Network (TS-SDN) for networks that span land, sea, air, and space. It was designed from the ground-up to support multiple aerospace networking projects, which until recently included non-geostationary satellite constellations, in addition to the balloon-based production network that it orchestrates today at Loon.
Large enterprises and startups are racing to build their own non-geostationary constellation of satellites and high-altitude platforms to provide affordable, broadband Internet service to the billions of people that still lack access to it. But no single solution can solve the problem; just as population densities on Earth are non-uniform and span roughly five orders of magnitude, the trade-off between coverage and capacity-density will require five altitude layers (towers, stratospheric platforms, low-earth orbiting, mid-earth-orbiting, and geostationary orbiting satellites).
Enabling the stratospheric layer and the ability for high-altitude platforms to internetwork with the layers above and below is of key strategic interest to Loon. As such, Loon is externalizing its network orchestration stack and transforming it into a multi-tenant production service to enable the internetworking and coordination of the world’s aerospace networks.
Loon is seeking a Software Engineer Manager for the team that develops this stack. We’ll depend on your technical expertise and experience to ensure that Alphabet best-practices are followed as the team undertakes a multi-year effort to scale-up the production system 2-3 orders of magnitude and transition it to a multi-tenant, high-availability service with external, commercial customers and partners. You’ll also need to balance this long-term work against the team’s production responsibilities with existing, internal clients.
Responsibilities
- Support a team of 11, including 8 full time and 3 contract software engineers.
- Guide the team’s design choices and processes towards Alphabet best-practices.
- Collaborate with the team’s Technical Lead and Technical Program Managers on sprint planning and execution.
- Collaborate with both internal and external technical customers on their specific needs vs. team resources.
- Forecast resource requirements and help us grow the team as we connect people everywhere.
Minimum Qualifications
- Prior experience designing and running production distributed systems with external, client-facing APIs.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience training and serving ML models, especially with respect to Reinforcement Learning and/or Contextual Bandits problems.
- Experience with solvers for mathematical optimization.
- Experience with or interest in aerospace systems including communications satellites.
- Experience with or interest in networking, including wireless communications and software defined networks.