Mission Systems Team Lead

You will manage a group of systems engineers that are the technical linchpin of Astroscale UK, keeping our ambitious space systems projects, both early and late in product lifecycle, rolling towards key milestones. You will collaborate with diverse sets of engineers and project managers to facilitate trade-offs and mature system architectures and designs. The end goal is a technical solution that balances customer and internal needs and meets all performance requirements.

• Define the mission concepts, requirements, and timelines/profiles based on customer needs and stakeholder inputs, then mature and deliver a system the meets those customer needs and mission requirements
• Systems thinking approach and ability to see past trivial details and identify key drivers for system design, performance, risk and cost
• Lead and present trade-off analyses based on objective system analyses and engineering judgment and experience for early and late lifecycle engineering systems
• Design baseline and change management across the entire system lifecycle
• Manage key stakeholders (project managers, company leadership, customers, suppliers) to find consensus on critical technical topics
• Negotiate effective action plans for technical deliverables and risk mitigations with engineers and other technical people of different backgrounds
• Use discussion with subject‑matter experts and their analysis results to derive technical risks at mission and system levels
• Delegate and escape effectively to other technical stakeholders such that everyone is satisfied with agreed scope and schedule and without excessive stress or workload
• Be patient in addressing complex organisational and project issues; persevere through long change and improvement negotiation processes with technical stakeholders
• Discuss system‑level technical issues with non‑technical people of different backgrounds and come to a common understanding, acceptable compromises and clear technical status

• Line management of 6-8 team members. This includes helping resolve blockers to their work, prioritising their work, conducting appraisals and conducting probation reviews.
• Planning the technical work for the team members. Assigning tasks appropriately and effectively taking team member skillsets and abilities into account
• Some oversight and detailed review of the team's technical output.
• Identify skillset and headcount/labour shortfalls in context of current and upcoming team workload
• Work with the group manager to create a plan together to address resource shortfalls (including permanent hiring, temporary hiring and/or outsourcing solutions)
• Support recruitment by reviewing CVs and conducting interviews for positions in your team
• Create a plan to address the development needs of the existing team members
• When time allows, supporting the team by assisting with technical engineering work. The ability to do this will depend upon the number of people being managed.

• 5+ years' experience of space system engineering or engineering of similarly complex systems
• At least a basic understanding of the critical subsystems and functions that make up a typical satellite mission
• Good understanding of complex system validation, verification and delivery, including methods for managing stakeholders around technical risk and scope in the face of challenging budget and schedule constraints
• Experience with engineering requirement derivation and management
• Ability to perform complicated technical and programmatic trade-offs
• Comfortable working with engineering simulations and outputs of common aerospace engineering tools

• 2+ years of experience managing a team of systems engineers
• 8+ years of experience of space system engineering or engineering of similarly complex systems
• Good understanding of any other space system functional areas (mechanical, thermal, mechanisms, GNC, etc.)
• Experience of satellite-level AIT
• Experience of space mission operations
• Experience working on ESA and similar institutional projects

• Competitive base salary
• Opportunity to work with a highly talented, diverse & dynamic…