Senior Space Systems Engineer, Mission Optimization

Description

The company builds, launches and runs the largest constellation of imaging satellites ever built, and sells the data it produces through a cloud-based platform to customers in commercial, environmental and humanitarian work.

The company is both a space business and a data business, and it controls hardware design, manufacturing, data processing and software internally, so the office mixes specialists from many fields.

Customers use the data to build new technologies, grow revenue, support research and tackle large global problems.

Staff work remotely around the world and also sit in offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and the Netherlands.

The Mission Optimization team improves the operations and output of the largest Earth observation satellite constellation. It finds the constraints that cap fleet output, such as contact scheduling, downlink latency, collection capacity and concepts of operation for future missions, and resolves them.

Responsibilities

• Take a customer commitment, contractual obligation or unused spacecraft capability and turn it into an operational concept that engineering can build and operators can run.
• Define and own concepts of operations for new missions, new spacecraft capabilities and new customer products, from early design through nominal operations.
• Translate contractual and customer obligations into operational concepts and capacity commitments that the fleet can meet.
• Lead optimization work that crosses several organizations, setting technical direction, getting agreement and tracking results against fleet SLAs and KPIs.
• Model and analyze fleet performance using operational data to find where capacity, latency or agility is being wasted.
• Design, build and maintain the software that puts these concepts into practice.
• Act as the main technical contact for the team with engineering, operations and product stakeholders.
• Serve as a recognized subject-matter expert across the company and mentor people within the team.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant experience in spacecraft operations, mission systems engineering or a closely related field.
• A bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Experience owning concepts of operations for complex operational systems, from definition through implementation.
• Working proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with the ability to model systems, analyze operational data and contribute production code.
• A quantitative approach, including statistical analysis and reasoning over large operational datasets.
• A record of leading technical initiatives across organizational boundaries.
• The ability to communicate and negotiate technical positions with senior stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers.
• Stand out: experience operating or designing operations for a large satellite constellation.
• Stand out: background in optimization, scheduling or operations research.
• Stand out: experience taking a new mission from design through commissioning and nominal operations.
• Stand out: familiarity with commercial Earth observation, tasking or fulfillment systems.
• Stand out: experience in a customer- or partner-facing technical role.
• Stand out: familiarity with orbital mechanics, link budgets and spacecraft resource modeling.
• Stand out: experience with DevOps tools and practices, such as Git, GitLab, Docker, CI/CD, Linux, Sentry and Datadog.

Conditions

Full-time, hybrid role requiring work from the Berlin office 3 days per week.

Expected starting gross salary range in Germany: €86.600 - €108.300 EUR.

The role may also be eligible for discretionary bonuses and/or equity.

Salary placement is based on gender-neutral criteria such as skills, qualifications and experience, and the company considers applicants with arrest and conviction records under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

The role requires access to U.S. and German/EU export-controlled information, so employment, or hiring of a contractor, depends on being able to access all applicable export-controlled information without additional licensing from German, EU or U.S. authorities. The company Labs Germany GmbH is authorized to receive U.S. export-controlled information under a Bureau of Industry and Security license.

Applications close at 23:45 CET on the date listed below, are reviewed on a rolling basis, and the posting may be taken down early once enough suitable applications arrive, so apply as soon as you can.

Benefits

• Paid time off, including vacation, public holidays and company-wide days off.
• Employee wellness program.
• Home office reimbursement.
• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement.
• Tuition reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning.
• Equity.
• Paid volunteering time off.
• Offerings depend on employment type and location, under applicable law or company policy.