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As a Staff Mission Architect at Impulse, you will define mission-level logic and requirements that guide aerospace and defense system architecture before vehicle design begins. You serve as the critical bridge between Business Development (who brings customer ambitions) and Program Management/Engineering (who execute solutions).
Your core responsibility is transforming vague or incomplete customer inputs—broad mission challenges, loosely defined operational goals, partial technical requirements, or emerging government concepts—into quantitative, defensible mission requirements that shape early pursuits and enable disciplined architecture development.
Key responsibilities include:
• Lead mission-level analysis across payloads, constellations, ground systems, command & control, cyber, and operational context to define mission success criteria and performance thresholds
• Convert ambiguous customer desires into quantitative requirements that guide downstream conceptual design
• Develop and employ mission-level modeling and simulation tools for coverage analysis, NIIRS scoring, gap times, latency modeling, mission availability, constellation behavior, and resilience assessments
• Produce derived requirements for mission elements such as sensitivity, delta-V envelopes, timeline constraints, communications/latency performance, revisit and coverage metrics, and payload-specific performance parameters
• Partner with Advanced Mission Concepts Engineers to evaluate conceptual solutions against mission requirements and assess mission impact of engineering-driven tradeoffs
• Act as the mission architecting lead during early capture phases, shaping mission definitions, requirement frameworks, evaluation criteria, and success metrics
• Support Business Development by generating mission-analysis content for white papers, BAAs, RFIs, challenge submissions, and requirements-shaping discussions with government customers and FFRDC/UARC partners
• Conduct red-team-style assessments to identify mission weaknesses, operational risks, adversary constraints, and system-of-systems considerations
• Ensure mission architectures incorporate realistic operational constraints including ground station availability, crosslink integration, cyber hardening, adversary counters, and resilience needs
• Build reusable mission-analysis models and tools to compound requirements development across pursuits
• Work with industry and government partners on analysis frameworks, tools, and scenarios
You will engage directly with U.S. Government customers and program offices, with travel up to approximately 25%.
Required qualifications: Bachelor's degree in a technical field; 8+ years of aerospace, defense, or intelligence community experience in mission analysis, systems-of-systems engineering, or operational modeling; demonstrated ability to derive quantitative mission requirements from ambiguous inputs; proficiency with mission-level modeling tools (STK, AGI Analysis Workbench, EO/IR performance tools) and scripting languages (Python, MATLAB); familiarity with payload performance modeling, constellation analysis, ground segment architectures, C2 systems, and cyber considerations; strong technical writing skills; eligibility for U.S. security clearance with ability to obtain TS/SCI.
