Customer-Facing Space Ground Systems Engineer

Northwood; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwood Space is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in the Washington, DC area to work with satellite operators, shape requirements, and guide deployments from first conversations through post-deployment support.

You will collaborate with Business Development, Engineering, and Program Management to ensure customer success, build trust, and translate mission needs into actionable priorities for internal teams. Willingness to travel is required.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions or systems engineering, mission operations, or BD.
• Strong ability to build trust with technical customers and translate complex needs into priorities.
• Comfortable operating across hardware, software, networking, and business objectives.

Responsibilities

• Make customer missions succeed on Northwood's network.
• Serve as the primary technical contact for customers during capture, onboarding, and post-deployment.
• Collaborate with Engineering to bring up, troubleshoot, and validate operations on the network.
• Ship code, debug integrations, and validate operations with customers and Engineering.
• Support Business Development on qualification, proposals, and expansion.
• Lead technical discovery, demos, and readiness reviews with Program Management.
• Capture customer requirements and translate them into clear Engineering priorities.
• Identify friction points and blockers to inform product and network improvements.
• Coordinate onboarding and deployment readiness, flag risks, and align internal teams around objectives.
• Create reusable discovery frameworks and customer-facing materials.

Skills

Customer facing tech

Strong communicator

Cross-functional collaboration

Travel willingness

Education

Bachelor's in EE/CE/CS/Aerospace

Job description

Northwood Space is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in the Washington, DC area to work with satellite operators, shape requirements, and guide deployments from first conversations through post-deployment support.

You will collaborate with Business Development, Engineering, and Program Management to ensure customer success, build trust, and translate mission needs into actionable priorities for internal teams. Willingness to travel is required.