Is anyone working as an embedded engineer, in or out of the space industry? How can I learn more and see if it might be a fit for me? Do you like what you do?
I worked on space ops for a space agency and was in charge of satellite onboard computers, so although I didn't write the code I was on it constantly to understand it, evaluate it, test it, or even live patch it (as in patch the assembly in RAM and persistent memory to remove a bug).
It is really cool, because what you write is working with a myriad of complex systems that, if you're curious as an engineer, are fascinating: thermal, radio, attitude control, propulsion, all kinds of payloads (cameras, lasers, radiometers, radars...). I loved it.
The downside is that you'll barely encounter "cutting edge" hardware to develop in, and the tooling in the industry is also atrocious. This is probably changing outside the big agencies (and even in JPL they used a consumer CPU for the Mars copter).
Projects take a long time (years) and everything is controlled and documented ad nauseum. This is normal, as you don't get to just load a new version of the software if you screw up the critical software update path (comms + command handling + memory handling + alarm handling + real time constraints + ...). Also, many other parts of the software do have an effect on the hardware (e.g. you may get into an attitude that burns your payload).
If you want to learn more, start with simple embedded projects with sensors and actuators without an OS and then move to something real-time with RTEMS or similar RTOS. Maybe today you can even build your own navigation computer for a drone for cheap. You'll definitely have to use an RTOS for that and you can't go call some cloud service to control your drone, so great for learning.
C and C++ are the languages of choice. Ada is used in some projects too.
Train yourself to think about what's the worst case scenario and how to handle it, and how to be nimble with your data handling.
You do need domain knowledge as well. The book that everyone I know has read is "Spacecraft Systems Engineering"[1]. I read it cover to cover when I started in the industry.
Happy to expand if you have any questions.
[1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Spacecraft+Systems+Engineering%2...