Mission Manager

The role

You will lead the delivery of customer missions from contract signature to deployment on orbit. You will own the Mission Development Plan and schedule, work with engineering, product and operations teams, and keep customers and Loft aligned on progress.

What you will do

• Own the Mission Development Plan for assigned missions, from identifying all required work to driving completion against launch-anchored deadlines and customer milestones
• Manage the day-to-day customer relationship for mission delivery, up to executive level, on scope, schedule and capability tradeoffs
• Manage the Customer Offering Portfolio, identify gaps against upcoming mission needs, and drive new capability development with product and engineering teams
• Partner with Customer Delivery Engineers to ensure the plans, capabilities and tooling they need are in place
• Represent operational and customer constraints in product planning and manage the deployment of new features into operational use
• Run internal reviews and report on development progress, risks and blockers to leadership and customers
• Build the tools, templates and workflows the Customer Delivery team needs, often from scratch, using Jira and spreadsheets

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience in technical program, product or engineering roles
• 3+ years managing technical programs or missions delivered to external customers
• Experience deploying products into production or operational environments, including release readiness and cross-team dependency management
• Experience in the satellite or aerospace industry, with working knowledge of spacecraft systems, mission operations or payload development
• Experience owning the day-to-day relationship with external customers, including executive-level scope, schedule and tradeoff conversations
• Strong technical aptitude to work in depth with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, and explain them to customers and executives
• Excellent, concise communication skills at all levels, with organization and prioritization skills for parallel workstreams
• Comfortable working with incomplete information and light process, with autonomy and good judgment on escalation
• Fluent written and spoken English

Nice to have

• Direct experience with satellite on-orbit operations, commissioning or ground segment software
• Technical leadership experience, formal or informal
• Experience building or managing a product or capability portfolio, roadmap or plan of record
• Experience with international customers and distributed teams

Benefits

• Equity
• Up to 35 days of paid time off (vacation and RTT)
• Flexible working hours
• Health and life insurance
• Lunch vouchers
• Cross-office travel between San Francisco, Colorado and Toulouse
• Company and team off-sites and events
• Relocation assistance to Toulouse when applicable

Before you apply

• Resume must be in English, as it will be reviewed across offices

About the company

Loft provides governments, companies and research institutions with a simple way to deploy missions in orbit, offering end-to-end missions as a service. Founded in 2017, it has flown more than 30 missions and is scaling a satellite fleet across offices in San Francisco, Golden and Toulouse.