Engineering Manager- Space Situational Awareness (SSA)

About Us SkyServe is sensor agnostic "Insights-as-a-Service" edge computing platform on-board satellites, providing inferences to industries, system integrator, and geospatial developers. Position Overview At SkyServe, we are expanding our space intelligence suite from onboard edge computing and real-time Earth observation into orbital domain safety, Space Situational Awareness (SSA), threat assessment and Space Domain Awareness (SDA). As the Engineering Manager of the SSA Platform, you will architect, lead, and scale the engineering engine behind SkyServe’s SSA platform. You will lead a high-performing team of astrodynamics engineers, distributed systems software engineers, and 3D visualization developers building a low-latency, scalable SSA Platform. Your mandate spans multi-sensor track ingestion (ground radar, optical networks, RF payloads, commercial sensor partners), precise orbit determination (OD), high-throughput all-on-all conjunction screening, and delivering air-gapped or cloud-hosted mission-critical interfaces for commercial satellite operators, civil space agencies, and defense programs. What You’ll Do

1. Technical Leadership & Platform Architecture

• High-Performance Astrodynamic Compute Engine: Direct the architecture of SkyServe’s core computational pipeline—translating complex perturbation models (J2–J4, atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, third-body gravity) and numeric propagators (SGP4/SDP4, Cowell, Encke, Runge-Kutta/Dormand-Prince) into high-performance, parallelized compute modules (C++, Rust, or optimized Python/CUDA).
• Multi-Source Sensor Ingestion & Cataloguing: Architect resilient, scalable streaming pipelines (Kafka, Apache Flink, gRPC) to ingest, correlate, and cross-tag heterogeneous tracking observations (TLE/OMM, CCSDS OEM/OPM, radar range/range-rate/raw data, optical angles-only right ascension/declination, RF ephemerides).
• Conjunction Screening & Maneuver Analytics: Oversee the screening engine evaluating thousands of operational satellites against 30,000+ cataloged debris objects; deliver sub-second probability of collision (P_c) computations (Foster, Akella-Alfriend, Hall algorithms) and automated avoidance maneuver recommendations.
• Geospatial & 3D Celestial Visualization: Guide frontend and GIS engineers developing interactive WebGL/Cesium-based 4D/3D ephemeris visualizations, covariance ellipsoids, sensor coverage cones, custom analyses and real-time pass predictions.

1. Engineering Execution & Delivery

• Mission-Critical SLAs: Ensure 99.99% uptime for orbital safety alerts, automated emergency Conjunction Data Message (CDM) generation, and mission telemetry streaming.
• Dual-Track Deployment (Commercial Cloud & Air-Gapped Gov): Partner with Solutions Engineering to ensure the platform deploys natively to public clouds (AWS/GCP/E2E/Other Sovereign platforms) as well as air-gapped, on-premise environments required by defense and institutional customers.
• Technical Standards & Compliance: Enforce compliance with international space standards (CCSDS formats, Space Data Association protocols, ISO 24113 orbital debris mitigation guidelines).

1. Team Leadership, Mentorship & Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and grow a 15+ member squad comprising distributed systems engineers, scientific software developers, and platform DevOps/SREs.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with the Astrodynamics, SSA Product Lead, and Sensor Partnership Directors to turn theoretical orbit estimation algorithms into production-grade microservices.
• Champion rigorous engineering practices: automated unit/integration testing on orbital baseline scenarios, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) telemetry validation, CI/CD pipelines, and rigorous code reviews. Who You Are & What You Bring

1. Must-Have Qualifications: Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Physics, Aerospace Engineering, Geoinformatics, or a related quantitative field.

2. Experience

• 8+ years of total software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in a technical leadership or engineering management capacity.
• Proven experience architecting and shipping distributed, high-throughput backend systems handling real-time streaming, time-series data, or scientific computing.

1. Core Technical Stack:

• Strong proficiency in C++, Rust, Go, or modern Python with experience optimizing compute-heavy algorithms (parallel computing, vectorization, SIMD, or GPU offload).
• Hands-on knowledge of stream architectures and distributed storage: Kafka, Pulsar, Redis, TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
• Experience with modern containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud-native observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).

1. Domain Familiarity:

• Fundamental understanding of orbital mechanics concepts (Keplerian orbital elements, reference frames like ECI/J2000, ECEF, TEME, coordinate frame transformations, TLE parsing, and covariance propagation).
• Familiarity with CCSDS standards (CDM, OEM, OMM, OPM).

1. Nice-to-Have / Strong Advantages:

• Experience working directly in SSA, Space Traffic Management (STM), satellite ground segment software, defense space commands, or aerospace simulation frameworks (Orekit, Orekit-Python, STK, GMAT, poliastro, or SPICE).
• Experience deploying software into secure, air-gapped environments or achieving compliance certifications (SOC2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP / GovCloud architectures).
• Exposure to satellite constellation operations, collision avoidance planning (COLA), or RF / dark tracking data processing.