Chief Engineer, Satellite Operations Software Support

Role Overview

• Act as the Senior technical point of contact within SOSS for all Ground Control Systems and their supporting platforms.
• Maintain a deep technical understanding of both legacy and future GCS environments, including Kubernetes, Cloud, non-Cloud Platform, NPK, Nutanix, Grafana, SQL/NoSQL DB, S3, and other supporting technologies.
• Represent SOSS requirements early in the design and planning phases for new systems, upgrades, infrastructure changes, and technology introductions.
• Manage the technical interface between SOSS, OPA, Mission Assurance, SOC operations, and Satellite Engineering), SCoE, QA, IT and vendors.
• Influence the SCoE roadmap from an operational support perspective, ensuring that future platform and GCS developments are realistic, supportable, and aligned with SOE needs.
• Act as the SOE/SOSS technical representative for GCS platform production environments, ensuring that operational requirements for Kubernetes and Nutanix-based environments are clearly defined, reviewed, and represented in roadmap and deployment discussions.
• Work closely with the GCS Product Owner to ensure that SOSS operational requirements, support needs, and production-readiness expectations are reflected in GCS roadmap and release planning.
• Ensure that GCS software and platform changes are operationally ready before they are accepted into production.
• Support the acceptance of GCS software from development into production, including SOSS-led User Acceptance Testing on non-production environments.
• Support integration testing and end-to-end testing of GCS systems against Satellite Manager, satellite-specific components, and other business systems.
• Review deployment plans, identify technical risks, validate environment readiness, and confirm that software releases are compatible with the supporting infrastructure.
• Help define technical checklists, validation steps, rollback criteria, and production-readiness gates to reduce operational risk.
• Ensure that required documentation is delivered before production acceptance, including support procedures, troubleshooting guides, escalation paths, system diagrams, monitoring guidance, and operational limitations.
• Work with SCoE, SOE teams including mainly SOSS to define effective Grafana dashboards, alerts, and monitoring views for real-time operational support.
• Support the continual training and technical development of the SOSS engineering team so they can provide effective Level 1 support and escalate correctly when deeper development or infrastructure support is needed.
• Participate in SOSS Level 1 on-call support for SOC-deployed systems, including GCS platforms and supporting tools, as required.
• Provide technical leadership during incidents involving software, infrastructure, network connectivity, storage, configuration, deployment, or application behavior.
• Help isolate root causes, coordinate the correct teams, prioritize fixes, and ensure a clear resolution path when ownership is unclear.
• Promote architectural consistency across GNS, eScorpio, Hilly, and future GCS platforms.
• Reduce one-off solutions, undocumented workarounds, configuration drift, and environment-specific inconsistencies that could create long-term support issues.
• Support the transition of infrastructure responsibilities from SO&E to IT, ensuring that SOSS operational requirements, support needs, and production-readiness expectations remain clearly defined.
• Provide technical input into future infrastructure planning, including hardware refresh, platform expansion, and satellite fleet growth.
• Support SO&E teams in translating satellite manufacturer requirements into SES functional and operational requirements for IT, SCoE, and SOC infrastructure.
• Support future operational deliveries, including SDS satellite software, PTG, MEOSphere software, and other future satellite or platform-related capabilities.
• Support the responsible use of AI-enabled tools within SOSS to improve monitoring, troubleshooting, incident analysis, automation, and knowledge management, while ensuring alignment with SES operational and cybersecurity requirements.

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• At least 15 years of experience in software and systems engineering.
• Strong expertise with Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, Nutanix, SQL/NoSQL databases, and operational infrastructure.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, automation, DevOps, and operational monitoring.
• Strong troubleshooting and incident-management skills.
• Fluency in spoken and written English with additional languages considered an asset.
• Experience with IT Security programs and standards (e.g., SOC2, IA-PRE, ISO 27001).

Tech Stack

• Cloud
• Cyber Security
• Grafana
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• NoSQL
• Prometheus
• SQL

Benefits

• Strong technical leadership and mentoring skills.
• Ability to work in mission-critical operational environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Great interpersonal skills.
• Openness to work in virtual teams with diverse cultural backgrounds.
• International travel may be required.