About the role

As a Ground Infrastructure Lead, you’ll be directly responsible for the ground infrastructure used to communicate with Muon spacecraft. You’ll be responsible for the end-to-end deployment of Muon-owned ground segment infrastructure (dishes, co-hosted, modems, etc.) as well as working with ground-station-as-a-service providers (AWS Ground Station, KSAT, Azure Orbital, Leaf Space, etc.) to ensure sufficient data throughput for our missions. You’ll split your time between working with our hardware and software teams to ensure connectivity, conducting lab-based preflight communications checks with RF engineers, traveling to ground stations around the world to deploy or support hardware, negotiating contracts with providers for both comms and tracking, coordinating with CSpOC (Combined Space Operations Command), and supporting on-orbit operations with constellations of spacecraft.

This role may be remote or located at our headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Responsibilities

• Maintaining reliable ground communications with Muon satellites through ground and relay communications systems
• Working with hardware and software engineers to conduct trade studies on flight modem / RF hardware to maximize connectivity with ground stations
• Developing roadmaps for ground infrastructure deployment to identify how to meet customer data latency and volume needs using a variety of systems (RF/Optical ground stations, sat-to-sat commercial relay service providers, satellite cross-links between Muon satellites, etc.)
• Efficiently scaling the communications systems from a few development satellites to production constellations for customers
• Ensuring that our cloud strategy is well matched to our ground segment strategy

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, math, or science discipline. Or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years designing and/or implementing communications systems for autonomous systems in harsh environments
• Some programming experience to mock up interfaces to providers and hardware as needed
• Hands-on experience with RF, network, and compute hardware to support delivering communication systems in the field
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and building ground station hardware (dishes, modems, pointing systems)
• Experience with ground-station-as-a-service provider(s) such as AWS Ground Station, KSAT or similar
• Excellent economic modeling skills to trade systems in terms of both technical capability and value.
• Familiarity with RF analysis equipment, e.g. spectrum analyzer
• Experience with Python or other scripting languages to build quick prototypes
• Understanding of TCP/IP networking protocols and cloud based solutions (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure)
• Experience with project management

ITAR/EAR Requirements:

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. The Company may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.

Salary Range:

The salary range for this role is $100k and $190k and will depend on a candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience as defined during the interview process.