As a Senior Systems Operations Engineer at Spire, you will be responsible for ensuring that on-orbit mission operations meet and sustain technical and service-level objectives. You will serve as the technical link between the development and operations phases of the mission lifecycle, ensuring that the constellation behaves as expected and that any deviations are rapidly understood, assessed, and resolved with sound engineering judgment.  

This role is central to Spire’s strategy to deliver scalable, reliable, and technically assured services using model-based engineering and validated asset profiles. Your work will ensure that decisions affecting constellation performance are made with technical insight.  

Role Responsibilities:  

• Own the technical quality of mission operations during the on-orbit service period, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are well defined, monitored, and maintained. 
• Assess and design strategies to address underperformance, providing detailed technical insight and coordinating resolution strategies in collaboration with Systems Engineering, Mission Design, and SRE. 
• Define and manage the high-level structure and performance requirements of asset profiles, ensuring they accurately represent mission needs and provide a clear basis for verification. Work with System Owners and SMEs to ensure subsystem capabilities are properly characterised, and with SREs to ensure ongoing validation of in-orbit performance. 
• Bridge the gap between Systems Engineering, Mission Design, Program Management, Customer Service, and SRE by providing technical leadership during the mission service period. Define the tooling and functional monitoring needs that enable the SRE team to maintain constellation health and respond effectively to deviations. 
• Support SRE, Platform, and Customer Service leads in triaging constellation or satellite issues that deviate from nominal asset profile definitions, ensuring escalation paths and responses are technically justified. 
• Act as a technical reviewer and contributor during Mission Readiness Review (MRR) and pre-launch handover, ensuring operational teams are equipped with validated, well-understood assets and clearly defined expectations for mission performance. 
• Identify operational risks and propose mitigations related to in-orbit performance, platform limitations, or evolving CONOPS. 
• Ensure technical consistency and justification for on-orbit changes such as mode transitions, re-tasking, or adjustments to duty cycles or resource allocations. Lead the rollout of complex fleet-wide changes when CONOPS are being updated, ensuring risks and dependencies are managed. 
• Collaborate across SRE, Platform, and Systems teams to codify lessons learned into reusable operational standards, documentation, and improved design practices for future missions. 
• Derive and maintain Operational Requirements by helping project teams translate mission and system-level requirements into operational-level non-functional requirements (SLOs, latency, freshness, availability), with verification methods and traceability. 
• Support configuration control during service, helping manage the versioned operational baseline (limits, parameters, tasking configurations) and working with SREs, System Owners, and Customer Service to prevent configuration drift across the fleet. 
• Support the definition and coverage of FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery) logic, ensuring coverage against top failure modes and reducing residual operational risk over time. 

Basic Qualifications:  

• BSc in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, or other relevant technical discipline. 
• 3+ years of experience in system performance monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly resolution. 
• Solid understanding of space system behaviour on orbit, including thermal dynamics, power management, RF communications, and tasking impacts. 
• Ability to translate system-level engineering context into clear operational guidance and tooling requirements. 
• Familiarity with SLA-driven architectures, system observability, and mission assurance principles. 
• Clear communication skills to align stakeholders across engineering, operations, and customer delivery. 
• Familiarity with software tools and frameworks used in operations, including strong Python, SQL skills and GitHub-based workflows. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience supporting operations of multi-satellite constellations. 
• Knowledge of asset profiling approaches and system models (including fault profiles, mode transitions, and performance boundaries). 
• Understanding of ground-segment tooling, SRE practices, or telemetry/telecommand systems. 
• Experience working with cross-functional, multi-time zone teams across engineering and operations. 
• Background in satellite mission design, including the transition from development to operations. _LI-MK1

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _LI-MK1

As a Senior Systems Operations Engineer at Spire, you will be responsible for ensuring that on-orbit mission operations meet and sustain technical and service-level objectives. You will serve as the technical link between the development and operations phases of the mission lifecycle, ensuring that the constellation behaves as expected and that any deviations are rapidly understood, assessed, and resolved with sound engineering judgment.  

This role is central to Spire’s strategy to deliver scalable, reliable, and technically assured services using model-based engineering and validated asset profiles. Your work will ensure that decisions affecting constellation performance are made with technical insight.  

Role Responsibilities:  

• Own the technical quality of mission operations during the on-orbit service period, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are well defined, monitored, and maintained. 
• Assess and design strategies to address underperformance, providing detailed technical insight and coordinating resolution strategies in collaboration with Systems Engineering, Mission Design, and SRE. 
• Define and manage the high-level structure and performance requirements of asset profiles, ensuring they accurately represent mission needs and provide a clear basis for verification. Work with System Owners and SMEs to ensure subsystem capabilities are properly characterised, and with SREs to ensure ongoing validation of in-orbit performance. 
• Bridge the gap between Systems Engineering, Mission Design, Program Management, Customer Service, and SRE by providing technical leadership during the mission service period. Define the tooling and functional monitoring needs that enable the SRE team to maintain constellation health and respond effectively to deviations. 
• Support SRE, Platform, and Customer Service leads in triaging constellation or satellite issues that deviate from nominal asset profile definitions, ensuring escalation paths and responses are technically justified. 
• Act as a technical reviewer and contributor during Mission Readiness Review (MRR) and pre-launch handover, ensuring operational teams are equipped with validated, well-understood assets and clearly defined expectations for mission performance. 
• Identify operational risks and propose mitigations related to in-orbit performance, platform limitations, or evolving CONOPS. 
• Ensure technical consistency and justification for on-orbit changes such as mode transitions, re-tasking, or adjustments to duty cycles or resource allocations. Lead the rollout of complex fleet-wide changes when CONOPS are being updated, ensuring risks and dependencies are managed. 
• Collaborate across SRE, Platform, and Systems teams to codify lessons learned into reusable operational standards, documentation, and improved design practices for future missions. 
• Derive and maintain Operational Requirements by helping project teams translate mission and system-level requirements into operational-level non-functional requirements (SLOs, latency, freshness, availability), with verification methods and traceability. 
• Support configuration control during service, helping manage the versioned operational baseline (limits, parameters, tasking configurations) and working with SREs, System Owners, and Customer Service to prevent configuration drift across the fleet. 
• Support the definition and coverage of FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery) logic, ensuring coverage against top failure modes and reducing residual operational risk over time. 

Basic Qualifications:  

• BSc in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, or other relevant technical discipline. 
• 3+ years of experience in system performance monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly resolution. 
• Solid understanding of space system behaviour on orbit, including thermal dynamics, power management, RF communications, and tasking impacts. 
• Ability to translate system-level engineering context into clear operational guidance and tooling requirements. 
• Familiarity with SLA-driven architectures, system observability, and mission assurance principles. 
• Clear communication skills to align stakeholders across engineering, operations, and customer delivery. 
• Familiarity with software tools and frameworks used in operations, including strong Python, SQL skills and GitHub-based workflows. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience supporting operations of multi-satellite constellations. 
• Knowledge of asset profiling approaches and system models (including fault profiles, mode transitions, and performance boundaries). 
• Understanding of ground-segment tooling, SRE practices, or telemetry/telecommand systems. 
• Experience working with cross-functional, multi-time zone teams across engineering and operations. 
• Background in satellite mission design, including the transition from development to operations. _LI-MK1

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _LI-MK1

Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation. We are moving from a model where trained operators watch dashboards and escalate to experts, to one where the system is fully autonomous, self-healing, and data intelligent. This team is building that future, and this role sits at the center of it. 

The old model relies on operators, escalations, manual processes, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts. It does not scale and it does not belong in a modern space company. We know what we want to replace it with: SRE principles applied to a constellation, autonomous fault handling, AI-driven anomaly detection, low toil, high data quality, and continuous improvement baked into the system. 

You will be one of the engineers who makes that real. 

What You Will Work On  

Autonomous Operations: 

• Design and build fault detection, isolation, and automated recovery pipelines for satellites and ground stations
• Drive elimination of manual processes. If a human is doing it repeatedly, automate it.
• Build space situational awareness systems so the fleet always knows its own state
• Develop operational automation for mission execution at scale

Telemetry and Data Platform: 

• Architect and build a flexible data platform that ingests, stores, and surfaces telemetry from space and ground assets
• Build analytics and visualization tools that surface operational insight and not just raw data
• Apply ML and AI techniques to detect anomalies, predict failures, and optimize constellation performance
• Work directly with data at every layer from pipeline design to query

Reliability Engineering: 

• Define and instrument SLOs and reliability metrics for space and ground assets
• Build monitoring and alerting systems that know what matters and ruthlessly suppress noise
• Own configuration control and software rollout processes for on-orbit and ground assets

Mission Software: 

• Build real-time dashboards and operator tooling that make mission status immediately legible
• Collaborate directly with satellite operators and mission teams to turn operational pain into software solutions
• Design systems for automated mission execution including planning, scheduling, and commanding at scale

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering, SRE, or DevOps experience
• Strong Python skills across backend services, data pipelines, and automation. Not just scripts.
• Real experience applying data analysis to solve complex operational or technical problems, comfortable working directly with data at every layer from pipeline design to query
• Solid Linux fundamentals including bash scripting and basic system administration
• Experience with containerized development and production environments
• The communication skills to work across engineering, operations, and mission teams and translate real-world requirements into working software

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with data backends such as Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, or S3
• Hands-on experience with Databricks or modern data Lakehouse tooling
• Experience building or operating monitoring and alerting systems such as Grafana, Prometheus, or Nagios
• Infrastructure as Code experience with tools such as Terraform or Ansible
• ML or AI applications in an operational or monitoring context
• Experience with Python data visualization libraries

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three business days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _#LI-MK1

As a Senior Systems Operations Engineer at Spire, you will be responsible for ensuring that on-orbit mission operations meet and sustain technical and service-level objectives. You will serve as the technical link between the development and operations phases of the mission lifecycle, ensuring that the constellation behaves as expected and that any deviations are rapidly understood, assessed, and resolved with sound engineering judgment.  

This role is central to Spire’s strategy to deliver scalable, reliable, and technically assured services using model-based engineering and validated asset profiles. Your work will ensure that decisions affecting constellation performance are made with technical insight.  

Role Responsibilities:  

• Own the technical quality of mission operations during the on-orbit service period, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are well defined, monitored, and maintained. 
• Assess and design strategies to address underperformance, providing detailed technical insight and coordinating resolution strategies in collaboration with Systems Engineering, Mission Design, and SRE. 
• Define and manage the high-level structure and performance requirements of asset profiles, ensuring they accurately represent mission needs and provide a clear basis for verification. Work with System Owners and SMEs to ensure subsystem capabilities are properly characterised, and with SREs to ensure ongoing validation of in-orbit performance. 
• Bridge the gap between Systems Engineering, Mission Design, Program Management, Customer Service, and SRE by providing technical leadership during the mission service period. Define the tooling and functional monitoring needs that enable the SRE team to maintain constellation health and respond effectively to deviations. 
• Support SRE, Platform, and Customer Service leads in triaging constellation or satellite issues that deviate from nominal asset profile definitions, ensuring escalation paths and responses are technically justified. 
• Act as a technical reviewer and contributor during Mission Readiness Review (MRR) and pre-launch handover, ensuring operational teams are equipped with validated, well-understood assets and clearly defined expectations for mission performance. 
• Identify operational risks and propose mitigations related to in-orbit performance, platform limitations, or evolving CONOPS. 
• Ensure technical consistency and justification for on-orbit changes such as mode transitions, re-tasking, or adjustments to duty cycles or resource allocations. Lead the rollout of complex fleet-wide changes when CONOPS are being updated, ensuring risks and dependencies are managed. 
• Collaborate across SRE, Platform, and Systems teams to codify lessons learned into reusable operational standards, documentation, and improved design practices for future missions. 
• Derive and maintain Operational Requirements by helping project teams translate mission and system-level requirements into operational-level non-functional requirements (SLOs, latency, freshness, availability), with verification methods and traceability. 
• Support configuration control during service, helping manage the versioned operational baseline (limits, parameters, tasking configurations) and working with SREs, System Owners, and Customer Service to prevent configuration drift across the fleet. 
• Support the definition and coverage of FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery) logic, ensuring coverage against top failure modes and reducing residual operational risk over time. 

Basic Qualifications:  

• BSc in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, or other relevant technical discipline. 
• 3+ years of experience in system performance monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly resolution. 
• Solid understanding of space system behaviour on orbit, including thermal dynamics, power management, RF communications, and tasking impacts. 
• Ability to translate system-level engineering context into clear operational guidance and tooling requirements. 
• Familiarity with SLA-driven architectures, system observability, and mission assurance principles. 
• Clear communication skills to align stakeholders across engineering, operations, and customer delivery. 
• Familiarity with software tools and frameworks used in operations, including strong Python, SQL skills and GitHub-based workflows. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience supporting operations of multi-satellite constellations. 
• Knowledge of asset profiling approaches and system models (including fault profiles, mode transitions, and performance boundaries). 
• Understanding of ground-segment tooling, SRE practices, or telemetry/telecommand systems. 
• Experience working with cross-functional, multi-time zone teams across engineering and operations. 
• Background in satellite mission design, including the transition from development to operations. _LI-MK1

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _LI-MK1

Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation. We are moving from a model where trained operators watch dashboards and escalate to experts, to one where the system is fully autonomous, self-healing, and data intelligent. This Director will lead that transformation. You will set the technical vision, define the architecture, build and inspire the team, and personally raise the standard for what modern space operations look like. 

The old model relies on operators, escalations, manual processes, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts. It does not scale and it does not belong in a modern space company. We know what we want to replace it with: SRE principles applied to a constellation, autonomous fault handling, AI-driven anomaly detection, low toil, high data quality, and continuous improvement baked into the system. 

What This Role Is Not: 

This is not a role for someone who wants to graduate out of technical work. If your ideal week is back-to-back 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and stakeholder syncs, this is not the right fit. We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team's respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title. 

What You Will Work On: 

Technical Leadership 

• Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations
• Set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure
• Stay hands-on: review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters
• Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them
• Be the person engineers come to when the problem is genuinely hard

Team Building & Culture 

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world-class reliability and platform engineers
• Set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege
• Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of
• Identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management

Operational Transformation 

• Lead the shift from manual, operator-driven processes to fully automated and self-healing operations
• Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation
• Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions

Cross-Functional Influence 

• Be the technical voice of the team in company-wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy
• Influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization

Basic Qualifications: 

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role
• Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale. You have owned things that could not go down.
• Deep technical credibility. Engineers on your teams have respected your judgment and not just your title.
• Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation. You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it.
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience hiring and developing engineers. You know what great looks like and how to find it.
• The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems
• Experience writing performance software in Rust
• Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real-time environments
• Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale
• A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _#LI-MK1

Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation. We are moving from a model where trained operators watch dashboards and escalate to experts, to one where the system is fully autonomous, self-healing, and data intelligent. This Director will lead that transformation. You will set the technical vision, define the architecture, build and inspire the team, and personally raise the standard for what modern space operations look like. 

The old model relies on operators, escalations, manual processes, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts. It does not scale and it does not belong in a modern space company. We know what we want to replace it with: SRE principles applied to a constellation, autonomous fault handling, AI-driven anomaly detection, low toil, high data quality, and continuous improvement baked into the system. 

What This Role Is Not: 

This is not a role for someone who wants to graduate out of technical work. If your ideal week is back-to-back 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and stakeholder syncs, this is not the right fit. We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team's respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title. 

What You Will Work On: 

Technical Leadership 

• Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations
• Set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure
• Stay hands-on: review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters
• Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them
• Be the person engineers come to when the problem is genuinely hard

Team Building & Culture 

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world-class reliability and platform engineers
• Set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege
• Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of
• Identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management

Operational Transformation 

• Lead the shift from manual, operator-driven processes to fully automated and self-healing operations
• Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation
• Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions

Cross-Functional Influence 

• Be the technical voice of the team in company-wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy
• Influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization

Basic Qualifications: 

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role
• Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale. You have owned things that could not go down.
• Deep technical credibility. Engineers on your teams have respected your judgment and not just your title.
• Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation. You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it.
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience hiring and developing engineers. You know what great looks like and how to find it.
• The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems
• Experience writing performance software in Rust
• Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real-time environments
• Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale
• A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. _#LI-MK1