Lead Systems Engineer

PAVE Space is building LYOBA, a heavy kick stage moving over 4-tonne payloads from LEO to high-energy orbits in under 24 hours. Neither LYOBA nor IBEX ships without one person owning the architecture, the interfaces, and the qualification path across both. That's the job. Two vehicles are running in parallel and systems engineering has been carried as a third hat by one of our senior engineers. It's the constraint on both programmes. You'll inherit the function and formalise it under load, on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters. You will own System architecture and the technical baseline for LYOBA and IBEX Requirements baseline and end-to-end traceability from mission needs to subsystem specs Interfaces: internal ICDs across subsystems and external ones with launchers, customer payloads, and ground segment VV strategy and qualification path for each vehicle System-level technical risk register and the plan to retire each item Technical content of every review gate, SRR through FRR, across both programmes What we are looking for 10+ years of systems engineering on large space programmes At least one flight programme owned from PDR through qualification Requirements decomposition and verification flow-down on a multi-subsystem vehicle: launcher, spacecraft, or upper stage Deep working knowledge of propulsion-driven architectures, storable or cryogenic Writing and defending ICDs with launcher providers and external customers Hands-on with the artefacts: architecture diagrams, VV matrices, risk registers. Not only reviewing them Working knowledge of ECSS or NASA systems engineering standards and the judgement to know when to depart from them English, fluently Nice to have: kick stage or OTV experience, prior experience founding the systems engineering function on a programme rather than inheriting it. You will fit if You're comfortable being the senior technical voice in a room where the PMs own the schedule and you own whether the vehicle is sound. You want to be on the floor with the engineers and at the test site when hardware fires, not running the function from a screen. You can disagree with the CTO and the programme managers in the morning and ship a coherent decision by the afternoon. You take matrix authority seriously, both the leverage it gives you and the discipline it demands. You'd rather write the VV matrix yourself than wait for someone else's draft. The job is fully on-site in Villeneuve (VD), with our test site in Chavalon twenty minutes away. The systems engineering function exists informally today and you'll be standing it up while two programmes run. This is hard and early. If you want a mature systems engineering org with established processes, this is the wrong seat. If you want to set those processes for the most ambitious space programme in Switzerland, it's the right one. We are building to ship, grounded on real hardware, real funding, real milestones. #J-18808-Ljbffr