Pixxel - Engineering Manager - Ground Software Systems

Role : Engineering Manager

Employment Type : Full Time

Work Experience : 8 - 12+ years of relevant experience (including 3+ years in engineering leadership)

Education : Bachelor's / Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field

Role Description We are looking for an Engineering Manager - Ground Software Systems to lead the development of scalable, reliable, and mission-critical ground software platforms that power satellite operations.

You will lead a 12+ member engineering team across frontend, backend, DevOps, and infrastructure, delivering ground software across multiple satellite programmes including internal commercial missions and customer-supplied missions that support: Mission Operations Software, Acquisition Planning, Flight Dynamics, and Payload Data Processing.

This role requires a strong combination of technical leadership, product thinking, and people leadership, with ownership of delivery, architecture, team growth, and execution excellence.

You will work closely with mission engineering, operations, product, and commercial teams to translate complex mission needs into robust software systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineering Leadership & Delivery :
• Own end-to-end delivery of ground software systems, including planning, execution, and release timelines.
• Define engineering roadmaps aligned with mission, product, and business priorities.
• Provide accurate estimates, timelines, and risk assessments to stakeholders.
• Ensure high standards of code quality, reliability, scalability, and system performance.
• Drive engineering execution with a strong focus on accountability, predictability, and velocity.
• Support program execution, reviews, and stakeholder communication.
• Team Management & Development :
• Lead and manage a cross-functional team (10 - 12 engineers) across frontend, backend, DevOps, and infrastructure.
• Hire, mentor, and develop engineers across experience levels.
• Demonstrate a servant leadership mindset, enabling teams to succeed through support, clarity, and empowerment.
• Handle team dynamics, resolve conflicts, and foster a high-performance engineering culture.
• Product & Technical Strategy :
• Collaborate with product, mission planning, operations and commercial teams to define product vision and roadmap.
• Translate mission and operational requirements into scalable software architectures and features.
• Define and drive product and variant strategy for ground systems across different mission/customer needs.
• Balance short-term delivery goals with long-term platform strategy.
• Enable rapid prototyping and iteration for new mission concepts and capabilities.
• Architecture, Infrastructure & Systems Design :
• Guide system architecture for Mission planning, Flight dynamics, acquisition planning and Ground segment systems.
• Design scalable, reliable systems across backend, frontend, and infrastructure layers.
• Lead development of cloud-native systems and On-premise deployments for customer-specific requirements.
• Ensure robust DevOps practices including CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and incident response.
• AI & Automation Strategy :
• Define and drive the AI strategy within engineering workflows and products.
• Assess, pilot and institutionalise AI tools to build robust agentic development workflows.
• Enable use of AI for developer productivity (code generation, testing, debugging) and Intelligent automation within ground systems.
• Encourage adoption of modern tooling and frameworks to improve engineering efficiency.

Technical Areas Of Expertise The ideal candidate will have strong experience across several of the following :

• Software Architecture, System Design and Infrastructure :
• Distributed systems, APIs, data-intensive applications.
• Frontend systems for visualization and operational workflows.
• System design for high-scale, data-intensive applications.
• Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization and orchestration, CI/CD and Observability.
• Data & Processing Systems :
• Real-time and batch data pipelines.
• Handling large-scale telemetry and mission data.
• Performance optimization for compute-heavy workflows.
• Mission/Domain Exposure (Desirable) :
• Satellite ground segment systems.
• Mission planning / scheduling systems.
• Flight dynamics or scientific computation pipelines.

Required Skills & Qualification

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong system design expertise.
• 3+ years of experience leading software engineering teams.
• Recent hands-on experience in backend development.
• Experience building and delivering cloud-based systems.
• Strong problem-solving, leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Desirable Skills

• Experience in aerospace, scientific computing or optimization systems.
• Experience with hybrid (cloud + on-prem) deployments.
• Experience leading teams through scale or organizational change.

(ref:hirist.tech)