Senior Mission Architect

As a Senior Mission Architect focused on our Space Services offering, you will join a growing team responsible for providing unique space-based solutions to the commercial market. You will engage directly with the Spire Account Executives and Business Development teams and their strategic level customer accounts to understand operational requirements, qualify opportunities, and design space-driven solutions. You will collaborate closely with the Satellite Architect and engineering colleagues to develop customer-driven solutions that leverage Spire’s small satellite platforms, payloads, and global infrastructure.   

The role of Senior Mission Architect requires a deep understanding of challenges of building, launching and operating small satellites. With an emphasis on our Space Services offering, you will build intimate knowledge of the Spire satellite subsystems, payload capabilities, and system interfaces critical to customers seeking to deploy systems onto our network. Successful candidates will have a good balance of technical experience along with strong communications skills and experience in customer-facing roles. The role involves supporting business winning campaigns on commercial and government business, owning the technical requirements negotiation and ensuring that the customer mission objectives can be achieved with the offered solution. The role is the main technical customer facing leader representing Spire’s technology in the US market. The role will also take front end market and customer intel to feed into Spire’s technology roadmap and drive competitive differentiators.    

Responsibilities of your role: 

• Work as part of a Senior member of team to support the development of new mission architectures with Space Services customers, assess requirements and design the best possible solutions
• Coach and support the training of other Mission Architects to upskill technical competencies  
• Prepare and deliver technical presentations and reports explaining Spire’s products and services to prospective customers
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams and subject matter experts within the organization to assess feasibility of customer-driven solutions, refine scope and technical details of complex space mission programs, and generally represent the voice and requirements of the customer within the organization throughout the sales cycle
• Serve as a leader in the relationship between the sales and internal engineering teams
• Work closely with the sales team and product managers to identify gaps in current capabilities to drive the technology roadmap and enhance the product offering
• Support initial Space Services program execution through the System Requirements Review, providing systems engineering support to document customer requirements and ensure a seamless transition from sales to execution

Basic Qualifications / Experience: 

• 5+ years of experience in a senior level customer-facing technical role 
• Bachelor’s degree in relevant Engineering (e.g. Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical, Systems), Computer Science, Physics, or equivalent combination of technical and work experience 
• US Citizen 
• Experience in satellite mission design, development, and testing with a clear understanding of major mission design trades and scope drivers (power / payload duty cycle, communications systems / data budgets, ground stations, launch and environmental loads, EMI/EMC, thermal management, etc).  
• Knowledge of satellite design and orbital simulation software (e.g. AGI STK)
• Familiarity with satellite-based remote sensing and Earth observations techniques
• Familiarity with the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, specifically related to RF payload receivers
• Experience writing technical reports and proposals
• Strong interpersonal skills for building relationships with clients and effectively communicating with other members of cross-functional teams
• Strong comprehension skills to enable timely understanding of complex customer requirements and identification of thorough and sometimes unique solutions