Chief Engineer, Satellite Operations Software Support

ROLE DESCRIPTION SUMMARY 

The Chief Engineer within Satellite Operations Software Support (SOSS) acts as the senior technical authority and individual contributor supporting Ground Control Systems (GCS), operational platforms, infrastructure, deployment readiness, monitoring, and operational support activities.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

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, up-grades, 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 re-lease planning.
• Ensure that GCS software and platform changes are operationally ready before they are ac-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 sup-port procedures, troubleshooting guides, escalation paths, system diagrams, monitoring guid-ance, 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 plat-forms and supporting tools, as required.
• Provide technical leadership during incidents involving software, infrastructure, network con-nectivity, storage, configuration, deployment, or application behavior.
• Help isolate root causes, coordinate the correct teams, prioritize fixes, and ensure a clear res-olution 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 soft-ware, 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.
• Participate in SOSS Level 1 on-call support for SOC-deployed systems, including GCS platforms and supporting tools, as required.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Must Have

• 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

Nice to have

• Experience with IT Security programs and standards (e.g., SOC2, IA-PRE, ISO 27001)

OTHER KEY REQUIREMENTS / COMMENTS

• 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.
• For US based positions: must be US Citizen or Green Card Holder