Sr. Flight Dynamics Engineer

The role

This person will support the design, deployment, and ongoing operations of a large LEO satellite constellation. They will own constellation architecture, orbital analysis, maneuver planning, collision avoidance, and long-term orbital maintenance.

What you will do

• Design and analyze constellation architectures including orbital regimes, plane spacing, phasing strategies, and deployment concepts
• Perform trade studies for orbit selection to meet coverage, lifetime, and regulatory requirements
• Define station-keeping strategies and long-term orbit maintenance concepts
• Generate, validate, and maintain orbital state products including TLEs and high-fidelity ephemerides
• Plan and optimize orbit insertion, phasing, station-keeping, and end-of-life disposal maneuvers
• Perform conjunction assessment and collision risk analysis
• Develop collision avoidance maneuver plans
• Partner with mission operations, spacecraft systems, GNC, and software teams

Required qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in the spacecraft or satellite industry supporting LEO or MEO constellation missions
• Strong foundation in orbital mechanics, astrodynamics, and flight dynamics analysis
• Proficiency with industry-standard tools such as STK, GMAT, FreeFlyer, or equivalent
• Experience with orbit determination and estimation tools (e.g., ODTK or similar)
• Solid understanding of orbital perturbations and their impact on long-term orbital behavior
• Experience analyzing spacecraft dynamics, control authority, and propulsion performance
• Familiarity with conjunction assessment, collision avoidance workflows, and regulatory/compliance considerations

Nice to have

• 7+ years of experience in the spacecraft or satellite industry supporting LEO or MEO constellation missions
• Experience supporting on-orbit operations for large, multi-plane constellations
• Hands-on involvement in maneuver planning and execution during flight operations
• Proficiency with scripting and analysis tools such as Python, MATLAB, or Bash
• Experience working cross-functionally with GNC, mission ops, and flight software teams
• Familiarity with regulatory interfaces and operational coordination with external entities

Before you apply

• For U.S. Roles: applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the United States (i.e. Green Card holder), or other protected individual
• For U.K. Roles: requires Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) checks and eligibility to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC)
• For Canada Roles: must obtain and hold a security clearance at the reliability status level and pass security assessment for the Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) and ITAR

About the company

Xona is the navigational intelligence company bringing real-time, centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth. With Pulsar, Xona will offer a future-proof, backwards-compatible global positioning system.