Mission Operations & Ground Segment Manager

Come join us in shaping the future! Get in on the ground floor as the first member of our Mission Operations & Ground Segment team, working on a revolutionary satellite communications system. Build the control center, build the team, then fly the spacecraft.

Ascend Arc is a venture-backed startup founded to revolutionize the satellite communications industry. We are looking for doers who want to work in a ground-breaking and fast-paced environment. Our success will depend on your energy, skill, and creativity.

This is a build role before it is an operations role. We have no Mission Control Center, no operations software and no flight control team — you will create all three. You are the technical authority for everything on the ground, and the manager who grows the team that runs it. Our customers are commercial satellite operators, and the ground segment is part of what we sell them: you procure and develop the operations software, use it to fly the spacecraft through launch, electric orbit raising and in-orbit test, then deliver it and the spacecraft to the customer’s own operations team.

Expect to do that more than once, so build it to be reused.

- Own the ground segment architecture end to end: satellite control center (SCC), flight dynamics system (FDS), mission planning, mission database, data archive, networks and security
- Stand up the Mission Control Center from nothing — facility, consoles, servers, networks, redundancy and a backup control capability — and take it through readiness for flight
- Establish ground station connectivity with commercial and government providers worldwide, and own the technical interfaces and service agreements behind it
- Own space link security: encryption, authentication and key management for command and telemetry
- Design the ground segment for a fleet rather than a single spacecraft — common tooling, reuse across programs, and the ability to support concurrent missions

• Set the make/buy line for ground software — what we procure, what we adapt and what we develop in house — and defend those choices
• Own the SCC and FDS procurement end to end: requirements and statements of work, RFI and RFP, technical evaluation, negotiation support and contract technical content
• Flow the customer’s ground segment requirements back-to-back into supplier specifications and contracts, so what we buy satisfies what we owe — including deliverables, documentation, licensing, warranty and support terms
• Manage the ground software suppliers through development as the technical counterpart — design reviews, progress and risk tracking, change control, and resolution of requirement and interface issues
• Own adaptation and configuration of procured products to our spacecraft: mission database, telemetry and command dictionaries, displays, automation, flight dynamics models and orbit determination configuration
• For the ground software we develop ourselves, act as the technical customer: own the requirements, the priorities and the development plan, review the design, and accept each release against what you asked for
• Hold in-house software to the same standard as a procured product — verification, documentation, configuration control and quality — because it ships to the customer under the same contract
• Own factory and site acceptance testing and formal acceptance of every delivery, bought or built
• Own licensing, maintenance, version upgrades and obsolescence across procured and in-house software, both for our own use and for what transfers to the customer

• Own delivery of the SCC and FDS to the customer as a contract deliverable: installation and…