Your space-enabled career begins here

As a Senior Ground Stations Engineer, you will play a key role in building, installing and maintaining our global network of ground stations for communication with our growing fleet of CubeSats in the UHF, S-Band and X-Band frequencies. The ideal candidate will be a team player with a desire to deliver consistent OTAs. Strong collaboration skills coupled with self-motivation will be essential in tackling the unique challenges of the role.

What You’ll Do:

• Quickly develop an understanding of Spire Ground Station installations to lead a deployment team from the Glasgow office on new installations, continued maintenance efforts and troubleshooting/repairing anomalies in the field.
• Ability to conduct field assessments of new potential ground station locations by conducting site surveys (site viability, RF spectrum scans, etc.) and document findings providing a “go/no-go” decision.
• Ability to identify and mitigate radio frequency interference issues.
• Develop continuous improvement initiatives to further increase ground station reliability.
• Remotely debug ground station issues reported by outside teams or through in-house alerting metrics. Develop deployment plan of action based on remote findings. In the event travel is prohibited, be able to write detailed scope of work and work with local site hands to ensure repairs are completed to Spire standards.
• Ability to train junior engineers in RF best practices, troubleshooting techniques, using RF test equipment, installing/maintaining communications equipment, etc.

Key Skills:

• 5-8+ years RF telecommunications and/or satellite communications experience
• Debugging complex RF, electrical and mechanical systems
• Debugging user-reported issues
• Working knowledge of Linux/Unix
• Working knowledge of software defined radios and GNU radio platform
• Working knowledge of networking infrastructure (servers, switches, RF over fiber, etc)
• Installing/maintaining rack equipment
• Installing/tuning/maintaining antenna systems
• Working knowledge of RF test equipment (spectrum analyzers, vector network analyzers, oscilloscopes, etc)
• Knowledge of best practices for installing, maintaining and weatherproofing communications systems deployed in extreme environments
• Ability to create and test various cabling (coaxial, ethernet, control, etc.)

Preferred Skills:

• Willingness to travel up to 50% of time, sometimes on short notice
• Willingness to support systems in extreme conditions (from the arctic to the desert)
• Calm disposition in stressful situations
• Experience with RF systems and equipment operating from 400 MHz to 8 GHz
• Experience with antenna positioning systems
• Professional workmanship (clean worksite, neat installations, tidy cable maintenance, etc.)
• Ability to maintain and update detailed site documentation (installation details, RF results, etc.)

Spire operates a hybrid work model, and this position will require you to work a minimum of three days per week in the office.

Access to US export-controlled software and/or technology may be required for this role. If needed, Spire will arrange the necessary licenses—this is not something candidates need to have before applying. #LI-DC1