Mission Design and Flight Dynamics Manager

Department: Autonomous Systems

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Boulder, Colorado, Boulder County

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and mentor a team of navigation, flight dynamics, and mission design engineers, owning hiring, career development, technical standards, and the team's roadmap across programs and pursuits. 
• Serve as the technical authority for mission design, trajectory, orbit determination, and maneuver decisions from concept through end of mission. 
• Lead mission solutioning for inbound customers and RFP responses, translating customer objectives into CONOPS and demonstrating how Impulse vehicles close the mission, including fit checks against both as-built and concept-phase vehicles (mass, volume, CAD accommodation, propellant, power, and link budgets). 
• Partner with Business Development and customers to capture requirements, run rapid feasibility studies, and deliver compelling mission design content for proposals and customer meetings. 
• Maintain a current understanding of product line performance and capabilities, and feed mission needs back into vehicle roadmaps and concept-phase designs. 
• Direct trajectory design and optimization across regimes and propulsion types, leading trades that balance ΔV, time of flight, operational complexity, and navigation sensitivity. 
• Define navigation architectures and advance orbit determination and inertial navigation beyond LEO, including radiometric and optical navigation. 
• Own flight dynamics support to Space Operations, including planning, executing, and reconstructing nominal and novel maneuvers, orbit determination, conjunction assessment, and critical mission phases and contingencies. 
• Drive the team's toolchain and automation, building production-quality tools for propagation, targeting, orbit determination, maneuver reconstruction, and rapid mission analysis and visualization, with automated maneuver planning and execution that scales across a growing fleet. 
• Support licensing and regulatory work for missions, including debris mitigation and disposal analyses. 

Minimum Qualifications

• B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Astrodynamics, Physics, Applied Mathematics, or related field. 
• 10+ years of demonstrated experience in spacecraft flight dynamics, astrodynamics, or mission design. 
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical trades clearly to customers, executives, and non-specialists. 
• Demonstrated experience supporting spacecraft operations or mission-critical events. 
• Proficiency in Python and/or C++ for engineering tool development. 
• Demonstrated experience developing production-quality technical software. 

Preferred Skills and Experience

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering or related field. 
• Flight experience in GEO, cislunar, or interplanetary mission regimes. 
• Demonstrated experience with low-thrust trajectory design and optimization. 
• Development or maintenance of orbit determination filters (EKF, UKF, batch least squares); familiarity with DSN-based navigation, optical navigation, or deep-space tracking. 
• Demonstrated experience automating operational flight dynamics pipelines and scaling them. 
• Customer-facing experience, including proposals, RFP responses, or capture efforts. 
• Hands-on experience with spacecraft build, payload integration, or CAD-based fit checks. 
• Proven ability to lead effectively in a startup environment.