Principal Mission Assurance Engineer Verified today
The Role
The Exploration Company is building innovative aerospace technologies for space transportation. We are seeking a Principal Mission Assurance Engineer to lead our Mission Assurance team and own the end-to-end strategy that ensures our spacecraft is safe, reliable, and mission ready.
You will be embedded with design, test, and operations teams, driving the vehicle safety architecture, relentlessly driving risk down and availability up. You will be the technical authority for mission assurance across the programme and lead a team of approximately 6 mission assurance engineers.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end vehicle safety architecture, ensuring it meets all safety and reliability requirements from internal standards and external partners (ISS programme, ESA, CNES entry safety).
- Own overall flight reliability, responsible for assessing pre-flight risks and potential mitigations with vehicle design, analysis, and operations teams.
- Perform and review FMECA, FTA, PRA, and RAM analyses to identify risks and failure modes.
- Define and validate the spacecraft fault management and FDIR architecture.
- Work with avionics, software, and operations teams to implement fault management strategies and ensure safe behaviour under off-nominal conditions.
- Support on-console operations as the Mission Assurance representative and drive in-flight anomaly resolution. Feed lessons learned back into design and FDIR improvements.
- Lead and mentor a team of safety, reliability, and fault management engineers. Set priorities, review their work, and grow their technical depth.
- Champion a culture of mission assurance. Instil first-principles thinking, disciplined verification, and data-driven decision-making.
- Report to programme leadership on RAMS status, residual risk, and flight readiness.
- Drive corrective actions from anomalies, test failures, and operational events back into design improvements.
Requirements
- Master's degree in an engineering or science discipline.
- 8 or more years of experience in RAMS, mission assurance, or systems safety on complex hardware systems.
- Experience leading teams or projects, setting technical direction and delivering results.
- Proficiency with reliability tools (FMECA, FTA, reliability block diagrams).
- Deep understanding of fault tolerance, redundancy management, and failure detection, isolation, and recovery.
- Technical knowledge of spacecraft systems and operations (communications, orbital mechanics, avionics, propulsion, thermal control, life support systems).
- Strong written and verbal communication of technical information.
- Able to effectively manage projects and tasks while meeting aggressive deadlines.
- Thrives under pressure and is resilient in the face of technical challenges.
- Excellent organisational and interpersonal skills.
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience developing and validating FDIR logic, watchdog strategies, and fault response sequences.
- Previous experience in a customer-facing role working through design requirements, test acceptance, and verification, especially with a government customer such as ESA or NASA.
- Ability and willingness to put in extra time to mentor other engineers while being a significant individual contributor.
- Passion for advancing the commercial space industry and human spaceflight.