Mission Design and Flight Dynamics Manager

Department: Autonomous Systems

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Boulder County

Compensation: $170,000 - $230,000 / year

Impulse Space is building high-performance in-space transportation vehicles operating across LEO, GEO, cislunar, and interplanetary regimes. We are seeking a leader for our Mission Design and Flight Dynamics team, the group that turns customer objectives into executable missions, from first concept and proposal through flight operations and disposal. You will build and lead the team, set its technical direction, and stay hands-on in the hardest analysis, working closely with Business Development, Space Operations, GNC, and Propulsion.

• Build, lead, and mentor a team of navigation, flight dynamics, and mission design engineers, owning hiring, career development, technical standards, and the team's roadmap across programs and pursuits.
• Serve as the technical authority for mission design, trajectory, orbit determination, and maneuver decisions from concept through end of mission.
• Lead mission solutioning for inbound customers and RFP responses, translating customer objectives into CONOPS and demonstrating how Impulse vehicles close the mission, including fit checks against both as-built and concept-phase vehicles (mass, volume, CAD accommodation, propellant, power, and link budgets).
• Partner with Business Development and customers to capture requirements, run rapid feasibility studies, and deliver compelling mission design content for proposals and customer meetings.
• Maintain a current understanding of product line performance and capabilities, and feed mission needs back into vehicle roadmaps and concept-phase designs.
• Direct trajectory design and optimization across regimes and propulsion types, leading trades that balance ΔV, time of flight, operational complexity, and navigation sensitivity.
• Define navigation architectures and advance orbit determination and inertial navigation beyond LEO, including radiometric and optical navigation.
• Own flight dynamics support to Space Operations, including planning, executing, and reconstructing nominal and novel maneuvers, orbit determination, conjunction assessment, and critical mission phases and contingencies.
• Drive the team's toolchain and automation, building production-quality tools for propagation, targeting, orbit determination, maneuver reconstruction and rapid mission analysis and visualization, with automated maneuver planning and execution that scales across a growing fleet.
• Support licensing and regulatory work for missions, including debris mitigation and disposal analyses.

• B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Astrodynamics, Physics, Applied Mathematics, or related field.
• 10+ years of demonstrated experience in spacecraft flight dynamics, astrodynamics, or mission design.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical trades clearly to customers, executives, and non-specialists.
• Demonstrated experience supporting spacecraft operations or mission-critical events.
• Proficiency in Python and/or C++ for engineering tool development.
• Demonstrated experience developing production-quality technical software.

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering or related field.
• Flight experience in GEO, cislunar, or interplanetary mission regimes.
• Demonstrated experience with low-thrust trajectory design and optimization.
• Development or maintenance of orbit determination filters (EKF, UKF, batch least squares); familiarity with DSN-based navigation, optical navigation, or deep-space tracking.
• Demonstrated experience automating operational flight dynamics pipelines and scaling them.
• Customer-facing experience, including proposals, RFP…