Senior Mission Concept Engineer

Working for Open Cosmos

Aim high, go beyond! At Open Cosmos we are solving the world’s biggest challenges from space, providing businesses, governments and researchers access to more readily available information than ever before - ready for the challenge? Then read on… 

Growth Team

The Growth team acts as the powerhouse of the company, ensuring the immediate needs of the customers are swiftly met and the future ones are translated into a product roadmap and deliverable projects.

Each member of the team combines a mix of programmatic, system engineering, and commercial skills with specific strengths.

What will you be doing?

You will be leading and co-ordinating the UK team of Mission Concept Engineers responsible for writing proposals to secure future space missions and technology development projects for Open Cosmos.

Primarily, your team is entrusted to define a mission concept that leads to a real project. That means interacting with internal teams (system engineering, project management, supply chain) and external stakeholders to shape the technical (space, ground and launch segments) and programmatic aspects of a mission concept.

You’ll also be supporting the wider team by developing tools, analysis and processes to facilitate your primary work such as performing orbital analysis, system engineering trade-off, cost estimations or schedule.

You will work closely with the Business Development team to help shape opportunities with commercial and institutional leads  globally. Depending on your competence, your role may extend to external engagement with UK institutional stakeholders.

What you need to be successful

• Understanding of space missions - A solid general understanding of space missions (e.g. remote sensing, telecommunication, orbital analysis, space system engineering trade-off) is essential to the success of this role.
• Strong initiative - An interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, using your background in space engineering or physics to build high-level solutions, translating needs into requirements.
• Great mathematical and analytical skills - you will have to solve varied problems like power, delta-V or link budgets, answer questions like “how many satellites are needed to provide given coverage or revisit ?”,“what is the cross-sectional area of a rotating object?” or gathering information from external sources (news, internal intelligence) to provide benchmark analysis or market sizing.
• Dealing with ambiguity - You will have to face uncertainties inherent to creating mission concepts, you’ll need to be resourceful and progress despite a level of uncertainty in needs or requirements.
• Team management: - You’ll need to motivate, coordinate and organise a team, mentoring and supporting their development as well as make key decisions on resources and allocations.
• A strong communicator - You’ll be communicating a lot, so be confident in speaking, listening and writing, sometimes within large groups including customers
• A keen learner - You’ll be given the opportunity to learn from other teams on a variety of topics, exchanging with them to find the best solution for the whole mission concept, and ultimately project.