Flight Safety Engineer

Select how often (in days) to receive an alert:

Date: 24 Aug 2026

Location: Gatwick, GB

Salary: £62,000 up to £71,957 dependent upon experience

Contract Type: Permanent, Full-time

Security Level: SC

Location: Aviation House
- Gatwick, min 2 days in the office per week or 8 days across a month.

Visa Restrictions: This position does not offer visa sponsorship

Closing Date: 7th September 2026

Interview Date: w/c 5th October 2026

We are the UK's aviation and aerospace regulator and recognised as a world leader in its field, enabling a safe and sustainable commercial space sector in the UK.

This role is for a Flight Safety Engineer within the Engineering, Safety, and Environment team. The team provides engineering, safety, and environmental expertise to support the UK’s space regulatory functions, working closely with regulatory and policy specialists.

You will join a team of technical and safety experts supporting both launch and orbital activities, with this role focused primarily on launch, re-entry, and flight safety. As a Flight Safety Engineer, you will undertake technical assessments, quantitative safety analysis and engineering reviews to support the safety and sustainable growth of the UK space sector.

As a Flight Safety Engineer, you will:

• Assess licence applications, including safety cases and supporting evidence for launch, spaceport, range and orbital activities.
• Support monitoring licensees throughout the lifecycle of their activities, including carrying out on-site inspections, reviewing and analysing documents and other evidence.
• Prepare technical assessment, safety recommendations and advice to identify potential licence conditions.
• Apply modelling, simulation and quantitative analysis tools to support orbital, launch and re-entry safety analysis.
• Develop tools that support regulatory assessments and safety analysis. This may include modelling hazards such as falling debris, explosions, toxic releases, launch vehicles failures, satellite collisions or other safety-critical scenarios.
• Undertake research and development activities on topics such as space sustainability, space traffic management and launch vehicle flight safety.
• Work closely with policy and regulatory specialists translating complex engineering and safety concepts into clear and actionable advice.
• Develop and maintain knowledge of international space regulations, standards, and industry best practice.
• Contribute to development of software engineering best practices, including quality assurance, version control, issue tracking, release management and documentation.
• Participate in and contribute to technical meetings with academic collaborators, cross-government, international, industry and regulatory stakeholders, both internally and externally.

• Degree level knowledge of an engineering, scientific or mathematical discipline, or equivalent professional experience in a relevant technical field.
• Demonstrable experience applying modelling, simulation, data analysis, or computational methods to solve engineering, operational, safety, or mission-related problems, including the interpretation and communication of technical results.
• Demonstrable experience in the development, quality assurance, release and use of software for the purposes of scientific, engineering or safety applications.
• Excellent programming skills in a high-level language (e.g. C/C++, Java, Fortran, Python, MATLAB or equivalent language), with evidence of developing software tools to address real world problems.
• Knowledge of the software development lifecycle, including experience of issue/task tracking, version control, continuous integration, verification and validation.
• Knowledge of statistics, probability theory and relevant numerical methods, including interpolation, integration, regression, root-finding, optimisation, linear algebra and Monte-Carlo.
• Knowledge of aerospace, spacecraft or other complex engineering systems and their associated technical, operation or safety considerations.

The team is made of individuals with complementary skills and there is no expectation to have expertise across all of the areas…