System Administrator Rover Breadboarding and Telecoms

Sopra Steria; Stevenage; On-site; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology firm is seeking a System Administrator for an 18-month contract in Stevenage, UK. The successful candidate will be responsible for supporting the rover breadboarding and telecoms infrastructure, requiring proficiency in Ansible, Git, and Ubuntu. Essential qualifications include a BA/MA in a relevant field and the ability to work with a range of hosts. Experience with containerization solutions like Podman is necessary. Applicants must be fluent in English, and security clearance is required.

Qualifications

• Experience with Autoinstall or similar tools for system deployment.
• Configuration and installation of physical machines.
• Architecture design and implementation of IT systems.

Responsibilities

• Support the rover breadboarding and telecoms infrastructure.
• Maintain/extending older systems and understanding current infrastructure.
• Execute operations from install/update/upgrade packages through configuration.

Skills

Git

Ansible

Podman

Ubuntu 20+

Security clearance

Fluency in English

Education

BA/MA in relevant field

Tools

QEMU

Job description

System Administrator – Rover Breadboarding and Telecoms (1.5 years contract) [25215]

• Full-time
• Duration (in Months): 18

HE Space is a successful international space company, specialised in providing managed services and human resources to the international space sector for over 40 years. We hire space experts all over Europe across the whole spectrum of space-related activities, from engineering to science, software development, operations, marketing, finance and administration. Our employees contribute towards a wide range of groundbreaking space programmes including Galileo and Copernicus, ExoMars, Iris2, ESA BASS, ESA GSPT, LISA Pathfinder, Euclid, the Ariane and Vega launchers as well as the International Space Station. HE Space has joined forces with CS Group and Sopra Steria to lead the engineering and digital space market in Europe and to provide highly skilled consulting. We are passionate about people and invest in you to support the development of the European space industry.

Our exploration rover breadboarding and telecoms satellite infrastructure is using increasingly IM unsupported tools and services (be that older systems, newer systems, OS/software that IT simply don’t support etc.) raising a need to manage more and more of this internal to the site/project/department where we either want to be on more recent tooling (breadboarding) or maintain older tooling for spacecraft projects whose lifespan is in the tens of years and is expected to remain fixed.

• The role is to support this infrastructure in both the GNC and software teams as the projects require, this will involve responsibility for maintaining/extending but may in the case of older systems require learning/understanding the current infrastructure before making substantial adjustments/redeployments.
• Our current implementation on breadboarding relies on Ansible executing against a variety of different hosts performing operations from install/update/upgrade packages thru host environment configuration thru checkout and build internal projects from source for deployment on host or in containers.
• Expect to be working with a range of hosts on breadboarding (industrial PCs, workstation PCs, VMs) that need as much commonality but each have their own quirks (i.e. not all the industrial PCs can be expected to have consistent network access and will travel out into the field with the rover). The telecoms side is far more consistent with tens of VMs that need to and can be maintained as identical environments.

You will have the following qualifications and relevant experience:

• BA/MA in relevant field
• Knowledge of Git for version control of scripts
• Knowledge of Ansible for configuration control
• Experience with Autoinstall or similar tools for system deployment
• Experience with Ubuntu 20+ or comparable Debian-based operating systems
• Experience with Podman or equivalent containerization solutions:
  • Hardware passthrough for graphical applications on unsupported hardware/software (e.g., Nvidia K2000 on RHEL 6)
  • Hardware emulation (e.g., QEMU)
  • Utilised for both development and service hosting
• Configuration and installation of physical machines along with required support hardware: Racking machines, Specialized racks with acoustic dampening, Power delivery/UPS systems, Network infrastructure requirements, etc
• Architecture design and implementation of IT systems
• Security clearance is needed for this position
• Fluency in English is mandatory; knowledge of another European language is an advantage.

This job is located in Stevenage, UK.

If you think you have what it takes for this job, please send your CV (in English and in Word or PDF) by clicking on the button “Apply for this job” quoting job NL-HP-25215.

An exciting and dynamic international working environment awaits you!

Inclusive and committed employer, our company works every day to combat all forms of discrimination and promote a respectful working environment. That's why, committed to gender diversity and overall inclusivity, we encourage all applications and profiles.

Last apply date: 22/01/2026!