Senior Program Manager, Payload and Space Systems

Senior Program Manager, Payload and Space Systems

About Us:

Black Sky is a real-time intelligence company. We own and operate the world's most advanced space-based intelligence platform and provide customers satellite imagery, automated analytics and high-frequency monitoring of strategic locations, economic assets, and events from around the globe. Black Sky is trusted by the most demanding allied military and intelligence organizations and commercial companies to deliver foresight into critical matters that affect national security and the economy.

Black Sky's data enables governments and businesses to see, understand and anticipate change as it happens, giving them the ultimate strategic advantage so they can act quickly. Our global team works with cutting-edge technology to make a difference around the world and prides itself on being people-first, customer-focused and fun. Black Sky is looking for a program manager that will support our payload development and performance verification.

This position represents a critical portion of larger engineering and spacecraft design portfolio, inclusive of managing vendors, perform, highlight and communicate trades to internal and customer stakeholders, challenging the assumptions of cost, schedule and performance to optimize for Black Sky’s business needs. This position spans a broad skillset of ability to manage hardware and test assets, support, execute and document testing and results, tracking program schedule, risk and system performance, review and distill data for team consumption and action.

The ideal candidate has demonstrated the ability to manage their own efforts over a broad scope of work as an independent contributor, while forging solutions and risk mitigations from a set of critical constraints. This candidate looks for problems and areas where process, support, and technical understanding can be used to find better and more efficient design and development solutions.

This position will be based out of our Seattle office with the option to support a hybrid schedule 2 days per week. Some time in our manufacturing facility in Tukwila is also expected to support testing timelines.

• Support vendor management, trade study development, risk and program tracking for key subsystem development of the satellite prioritizing payload and satellite cross link systems.
• Develop and maintain relationships with suppliers for emerging technologies.
• Interface with the engineering teams to evaluate compliance to the specification and opportunities to improve the subsystem to business benefit.
• Track action items and schedules across engineering teams including maintaining accurate logs of vendor discussions and decision points.
• Drive technical communications with vendors and internal teams shaping the development framework to support integrated product solutions.
• Shepard the engineering team through key milestone reviews including but not limited to Preliminary Design, Critical Design and Test Readiness.
• Support the entire development lifecycle for optimization and identify design and decision gates along with the developing the associated criteria.
• Track action items and schedules across engineering teams, including maintaining accurate logs of design release status.
• Coordinate with the procurement team to hand off new developments ready for stable production delivery cadences.
• Shepard the engineering team through key milestone reviews including, but not limited to, Preliminary Design, Critical Design, Test Readiness, and early production deliveries, as well as launch readiness review.
• Manage reports and support development of standard documentation with respect to payload system qualification and flight testing to support our internal business targets.
• Interface with the full system level schedule and identify key milestones to manage risk.
• Facilitate and become an expert in satellite system testing including developing training material for other team members and longer term hand off to production.

• Bachelor’s Degree in an engineering discipline or equivalent experience
• Eight years of direct Project Management Experience or…