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As a Staff Advanced Mission Concepts Engineer at Impulse, you will bridge the gap between customer ambitions and the engineering reality of orbital transfer vehicles. You will own the physics-based feasibility of future missions, ensuring concepts are not just bid but architected for success. Working within the Mission Management team, you will partner with Business Development and Engineering to shape mission concepts, define system-level requirements, and ensure every solution is physically executable. This role includes direct customer engagement and occasional travel.
Key responsibilities include applying first-principles engineering and first-order systems sizing to rapidly iterate on mission concepts and architecture feasibility. You will define mission architectures including CONOPS (concept of operations), trajectory requirements, and system-level trade studies. You will partner with engineering leads to ensure designs are grounded in realistic hardware constraints and act as the technical lead during capture phases, co-authoring concepts with Business Development.
You will conduct iterative feasibility assessments to identify and bound technical risks before mission commitment, serving as the technical interface for customers to translate high-level ambitions into defined, executable mission requirements. You will lead complex trade studies that balance competing requirements, collaborating with subject-matter experts to validate performance and ensure technical rigor.
Required qualifications include a Bachelor's degree in a technical field and 8+ years of aerospace engineering experience with a focus on systems engineering, mission analysis, or advanced concept design. You must have a strong ability to translate complex physics and orbital constraints into clear, non-technical trade-offs for executive stakeholders. Deep proficiency with mission analysis tools (e.g., STK, GMAT, FreeFlyer) and scripting languages (Python, MATLAB) is essential, along with functional understanding of spacecraft systems and payload accommodations.
