Your mission

As Senior Ground Segment Engineer, you will lead the design, deployment, and lifecycle management of Skynopy’s ground station infrastructure. This includes consolidated RF architectures, digitization and signal distribution chains, secure connectivity layers, and site supervision.

You will operate at the intersection of engineering, infrastructure and regulatory compliance, and support the delivery of mission-critical ground assets across multiple strategic programs.

This role requires both a technical leadership mindset and the ability to drive multi-site execution involving suppliers, licensing agencies, integrators and internal teams.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Design

• Define and iterate on the technical architecture of new ground stations, covering RF systems, digitizers, signal transport and security

• Contribute to the evaluation and prototyping of disruptive ground station architectures

• Ensure all deployed stations meet the performance and resilience needs of critical space missions

Site & Deployment

• Identify third party ground station antennas and sites to be added to our network

• Conduct and/or supervise technical and regulatory site surveys, with RF, infrastructure and licensing assessment

• Manage end-to-end procurement, integration and deployment of antenna systems and associated hardware

• Supervise commissioning, acceptance testing and operational transition

Operations & Monitoring

• Develop and maintain remote monitoring and control capabilities to support 24/7 operational readiness

• Ensure preventive maintenance, upgrades and incident response processes are in place

• Write and enforce Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and quality documentation

• Supervise ground stations antennas and network monitoring

Program & Vendor Management

• Contribute to project coordination across multiple infrastructure programs, ensuring delivery on scope, time and quality

• Coordinate with suppliers (antennas, RF equipment, connectivity) and external stakeholders

🧳 Travel Requirement: this position includes regular international travel to support site surveys, deployment, commissioning and operational validation.

Must Haves

• 5–10 years of experience in ground station systems engineering, preferably in Earth Observation or telecom satellite operations

• Proven track record in end-to-end station deployment: from design to on-site integration and operations

• Solid understanding of RF systems, antenna configuration, link budgets, and data dissemination

• Knowledge of satellite protocols (DVB-S2/S2X, CCSDS, SCCC) with a system-level perspective

• Familiarity with networking and secure infrastructure design: LAN/VLAN, VPN, DMZ, traffic segmentation

• Experience interacting with national spectrum and licensing authorities

• Strong sense of ownership, autonomy and solution-driven mindset

• Fluent English required; French is a plus

Nice to Haves

• Experience supporting sensitive or defense-grade missions, including sovereign or restricted deployments

• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, virtualized modems, SDR, and secure remote operations

• Exposure to teleport environments, RF monitoring, and large-scale antenna integration

• Experience coordinating multi-site, multi-vendor deployments in time-critical contexts

Step 1: Behavioral Interview (30 minutes)
A short conversation with the Chief of Staff or a team member to get to know you, your background, and how you work with others.

Step 2: Technical Home Challenge (~0.5 day of work + 30-minute debrief)
You’ll receive a take-home challenge to complete on your own (about half a day of work). We’ll schedule a 30-minute session to review your solution and discuss your approach.

Step 3: Live Technical Interview (30–45 minutes)
A live session where we’ll go deeper into the home challenge and ask a few more technical questions to better understand how you think and solve problems.

Step 4: Final Interview with the Founders (45 minutes)
A final conversation focused on cultural fit, leadership potential, and alignment with our mission. We’ll also talk about your interests and what motivates you.