About the Role
As an SSA Solutions Engineer at LeoLabs, you will work at the intersection of customers, data analytics, and engineering. You will coordinate technical conversations with customers, translate operational requirements into actionable engineering requests, and perform analytical tasks to validate solutions. This is a hands-on role for someone with a technical background who enjoys problem solving, communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and learning in a fast-paced environment.
Key Responsibilities
- Customer engagement: Participate in technical discussions with customers to gather requirements, clarify objectives, and scope deliverables.
- Requirements translation: Convert customer needs and operational goals into clear requirements, user stories, or technical specifications.
- Solution support: Work with product and engineering teams to prototype, specify, and validate solutions; test and verify feature behavior against requirements.
- Data analysis: Perform basic-to-intermediate analysis of SSA datasets (e.g., TLEs, tracking data, covariance/position error, conjunction data) to support customer requests and internal decisions.
- Documentation: Produce concise technical notes, runbooks, and customer-facing documentation that explain solutions, assumptions, and recommended actions.
- Issue triage: Help triage customer-reported issues, reproduce problems, and coordinate fixes with engineering and operations.
- Operational support: Assist in preparing and delivering demos, technical briefings, and ad-hoc analyses for customers and stakeholders. Support customer operational events involving event analysis and manual Orbit Determination activities.
- Continuous improvement: Capture recurring customer needs and feedback to inform roadmap prioritization and product improvements.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Physics, Data Science, or related technical field (or equivalent relevant experience).
- 3-5 years of professional experience in an engineering, analytics, or technical customer-facing role.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable translating between technical and non-technical audiences.
- Practical experience with data analysis tools (Python, SQL, large dataset tools like Databricks, or similar).
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and deliverables at direction of the Director of SSA Technical Solutions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with basic SSA concepts (orbits, TLEs/ephemerides, conjunction assessment, tracking uncertainties).
- Hands-on experience with orbital mechanics libraries (e.g., SGP4, poliastro, Orekit) or domain-specific tools (STK, FreeFlyer, etc.).
- Experience with SQL, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), or basic scripting for automation.
- Experience working directly with government or commercial space operations teams.
- Familiarity with visualization libraries (Matplotlib, Plotly) to communicate analytical results.
- Experience with CI/CD, Git, or software development workflows.
Core Competencies
- Analytical thinker who can work from data to actionable insight.
- Customer-focused and service-oriented.
- Strong attention to detail and ability to document assumptions and limitations.
- Collaborative team player who escalates blockers and follows through on commitments.
- Eager to learn and grow technically in the Space Situational Awareness domain.