Mission Safety Engineer: Flight Risk & Validation Lead

Outlier Space; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Outlier Space, an innovative aerospace company in New Zealand, seeks a Mission Safety Engineer to tackle complex analytical challenges from design through flight, launch, and recovery. You will build models, perform safety analyses and provide evidence for mission approval, working with GNC, avionics, propulsion, and operations teams.

The role offers opportunities to own major analytical workstreams, mentor engineers, and contribute to a high‑performance safety culture in a fast-paced

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field.
• 4+ years in engineering analysis or aerospace systems.
• Experience owning complex analytical workstreams.
• Strong knowledge of launch vehicle flight dynamics and orbital mechanics.
• Proficiency in Python or MATLAB and C/C++.
• Strong technical writing and regulatory documentation skills.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Develop mission safety analyses across trajectory, debris, toxic hazards, casualty expectation and probabilistic risk.
• Build and improve models, simulations and analytical tools to understand vehicle behavior and risks.
• Translate complex analysis into clear, defensible engineering evidence for mission approval and regulatory submissions.
• Verify modelling assumptions, methods and outputs for robustness and traceability.
• Support safety assessments and methodologies for FAA Part 450 and other regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with GNC, avionics, propulsion, mechanical, manufacturing and mission operations teams.
• Support mission reviews, flight operations and anomaly investigations with rapid analyses.
• Challenge and improve tools, methods and processes to scale mission safety capability.
• As experience grows, own major analytical workstreams and mentor others.

Skills

Engineering analysis

Numerical modelling

Aerospace systems analysis

Launch vehicle dynamics

Regulatory writing

Mentoring

Traceability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Engineering/Physics/Applied Math

Tools

Python

C/C++

MATLAB

Job description

Outlier Space, an innovative aerospace company in New Zealand, seeks a Mission Safety Engineer to tackle complex analytical challenges from design through flight, launch, and recovery. You will build models, perform safety analyses and provide evidence for mission approval, working with GNC, avionics, propulsion, and operations teams.

The role offers opportunities to own major analytical workstreams, mentor engineers, and contribute to a high‑performance safety culture in a fast-paced