SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Portal Space Systems is building next-generation spacecraft for orbital operations. The Vehicle Performance Engineer creates an integrated, quantitative view of spacecraft health and mission performance used by engineering leadership, program managers, and executives.
This systems and data-integration role consolidates analysis results, engineering budgets, test data, and flight telemetry across disciplines. You will define data architecture, interfaces, update cadence, and governance to create a reliable integrated view of spacecraft performance. Key responsibilities include:
- Integrate mass, power, energy, thermal, propulsion, delta-V, GNC, specific impulse, test telemetry, and other mission-performance datasets.
- Develop and maintain spacecraft performance dashboards and graphical user interfaces using Python-based tools, Grafana, or comparable technologies.
- Work with subsystem owners to establish authoritative sources, common definitions, units, assumptions, metadata, and configuration traceability.
- Consolidate subsystem budgets and margins without replacing the technical ownership of contributing disciplines.
- Identify missing, stale, inconsistent, or conflicting data and drive resolution with appropriate owners.
- Create leadership-level indicators that communicate vehicle health, margin trends, readiness, and mission capability for spacecraft on the ground and in orbit.
- Perform high-level cross-disciplinary trade studies, sensitivity analyses, and "what-if" assessments using controlled source data.
- Compare predictions with test and flight results and highlight performance changes, emerging risks, or margin erosion.
- Build reusable data-processing, validation, visualization, and reporting tools.
- Provide integrated performance products for design reviews, test campaigns, qualification reviews, flight readiness, and on-orbit operations.
- Document data lineage, calculation logic, assumptions, tool configuration, and known limitations for reproducibility and auditability.
You will work closely with every spacecraft subsystem and regularly present results to engineering leadership, program management, and executive stakeholders. The role bridges spacecraft systems engineering and data engineering, requiring both technical depth and communication clarity.
