Senior Systems Engineer, Infrared Sensor Payloads

sierraspace; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Sierra Space is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer - Infrared Sensor Payloads to provide technical leadership and systems engineering oversight for advanced space-based infrared sensing capabilities supporting missile warning and missile tracking missions.

You will serve as a senior technical authority for the infrared mission payload, coordinating with payload suppliers, mission software and algorithms, spacecraft systems engineering, GNC, avionics, mission operations, and customer

Responsibilities

• Lead the definition, decomposition, allocation, and verification of mission-level and payload-level requirements for missile warning and missile tracking performance.
• Provide technical oversight of payload supplier activities throughout the development lifecycle, including design reviews, technical interchange meetings, risk reviews, qualification, acceptance testing, and delivery.
• Maintain an end-to-end understanding of the sensor-to-track performance chain, including target phenomenology, backgrounds, optics, focal plane performance, detection processing, discrimination, tracking, estimation, data fusion, and mission data products.
• Provide technical leadership for development, review and verification of missile detection and tracking algorithms, including detection, association, track initiation, state estimation, track maintenance, discrimination, and multi-sensor or multi-spacecraft track fusion.
• Work closely with algorithm and software teams to translate mission performance requirements into algorithm requirements, interfaces, test objectives, and verification criteria.
• Lead and review modeling, simulation, and analysis used to predict end-to-end mission performance across representative threat trajectories, viewing geometries, backgrounds, and operational scenarios.
• Evaluate infrared sensor performance including sensitivity, noise, dynamic range, spatial and temporal resolution, radiometric performance, calibration, line-of-sight knowledge, and other characteristics affecting missile detection and track quality.
• Support development and validation of performance budgets and technical margins spanning the payload, spacecraft, mission processing, and tracking algorithms.
• Ensure appropriate allocation and management of spacecraft-to-payload interfaces, including electrical, mechanical, thermal, data, timing, pointing, jitter, line-of-sight knowledge, and onboard processing interfaces.
• Work closely with spacecraft GNC and systems engineering teams to ensure pointing knowledge, pointing control, stability

Job description

Sierra Space is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer - Infrared Sensor Payloads to provide technical leadership and systems engineering oversight for advanced space-based infrared sensing capabilities supporting missile warning and missile tracking missions.

You will serve as a senior technical authority for the infrared mission payload, coordinating with payload suppliers, mission software and algorithms, spacecraft systems engineering, GNC, avionics, mission operations, and customer