Quality​/Product Assurance Lead

PAVE Space is building LYOBA, a heavy kick stage moving over 4-tonne payloads from LEO to high-energy orbits in under 24 hours. Real hardware, real funding, real milestones, and the first parts flying soon. That's the programme. You're the discipline behind every part of it that has to be defensible.

The quality function has been carried as a side job by the engineers building the hardware. That works at twenty people, breaks at sixty, and PAVE Space is past forty. The first customer audit is coming, the first insurer questions are landing, and the qualification campaigns need a real Product Assurance owner. You'll formalise it, on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters.

The Product Assurance programme for Space, Launch and Ground segments; qualification, acceptance, flight pedigree

The Quality Management System: processes, framework, and the path to potential certifications

Non-conformance handling, root cause and corrective actions at flight-hardware level

Insurer interface; the documentation, qualification evidence, and discipline that earns coverage on real terms

Configuration management and traceability: what part, what batch, what build, what test

8+ years of product assurance or quality leadership on space, aerospace, or other high-reliability hardware programmes

Direct experience standing up certifications, not inheriting a mature one

Track record managing institutional or commercial customer audits and qualification reviews

Supplier quality experience at vehicle scale, including incoming inspection on critical hardware

Hands-on with non-conformance and root-cause discipline at flight-hardware level

Comfortable being the PA voice in a design review when the schedule says ship and the data says wait

ECSS, NASA, or AS9100 working knowledge and the judgement to know when to depart from them

English, fluently;
French strongly preferred

Experience certifying a small organisation to AS9100

Experience with insurer or underwriter conversations on flight hardware

Quality on propulsion or pressurised systems

Experience standing up PA as a function rather than inheriting an established one.

You'd rather write the NCR yourself than wait for someone else's draft.

You see the QMS as a tool people actually use, not a binder on a shelf.

You can disagree with a PM on a shipping decision and still be on the same side of the engineering problem the next morning.

You know "tailored from ECSS" is the answer to most questions, not "by-the-book ECSS."

You take pride in the audit that goes smoothly because the artefacts were already there.

Fully on-site in Villeneuve (VD), with our test site in Chavalon twenty minutes away. There's no QMS to inherit, no audit binder on the shelf, no PA team underneath you. You'd be the one building it, while the first customers start asking to see it.

We are building to ship, grounded on real hardware, real funding, real milestones.