Technical Support Engineer (Aerospace)

University of Fort Hare; Stellenbosch; On-site; ZAR 480,000 - 720,000; Full time

Job summary

University of Fort Hare seeks a Technical Support Engineer to own the customer support experience end-to-end. You will handle post-sales technical queries, classify and resolve issues, and escalate complex cases to engineering while maintaining ownership of the ticket through resolution.

Responsibilities include developing a structured knowledge base, migrating clients to a new forum, creating clear FAQ articles, onboarding customers, and contributing to product improvement through defect and

Qualifications

• Bachelor-level engineering qualification in electronic, electrical, computer or mechatronic engineering, or an equivalent qualification.
• 2+ years in a customer-facing technical role such as technical support, applications engineering, field service, test or systems integration.
• Excellent written and verbal English with ability to produce clear technical material for an international audience.
• Strong organisational skills and a methodical approach to record keeping and issue tracking.
• Willingness to accommodate time zones outside standard office hours for launches and commissioning.

Responsibilities

• Act as the first point of contact for post-sales technical queries across the product range.
• Screen, classify and prioritise support requests; resolve independently using product knowledge and lab reproduction.
• Escalate to engineering for design-level input while owning the ticket to closure.
• Develop a customer support forum and knowledge base with integrated ticketing, FAQs and articles.

Skills

RF fundamentals

Digital comms

Schematic reading

Lab instrumentation

Git

Jira

Confluence

Slack

Markdown

Education

BEng / BSc Eng / BTech / Diploma in Electronic/Electrical/Computer/Mechatronic Engineering

Tools

Git

Jira

Confluence

Slack

Markdown

Job description

Our client in the aerospace industry is seeking a Technical Support Engineer to play a hands-on role at the heart of the customer experience, providing first line post-sales technical support. You will own the customer support experience end to end: resolving queries directly wherever possible, escalating them to our engineering teams where design-level input is required, and making sure every issue is tracked through to a conclusion.

Responsibilities

First line customer support

• Act as the first point of contact for all post-sales technical queries from our customer base, across the full product range.
• Screen, classify and prioritise incoming support requests, and resolve the majority thereof independently using product knowledge, documentation and reproduction of the issue in the lab
• Escalate the issue to the engineering team where the issue requires design-level input, while remaining the owner of the ticket through to closure.
• Ensure that every issue is tracked, answered within agreed response time, and confirmed as resolved by the customer before it is closed

Support platform and knowledge base

• Develop, in partnership with the Process Owner, a customer support forum with an integrated ticketing system, and structured FAQ and knowledge base sections
• Migrate existing clients from the current Slack-based support arrangement onto the forum without disruption
• Convert resolved queries into clear FAQ and knowledge base articles, so that recurring questions are answered once and thereafter self-served by customers
• Moderate the forum, keep it populated with up-to-date content, and keep answer quality and turnaround high enough that customers choose to use it

Customer onboarding

• Take ownership of new customer onboarding sessions, tailoring the content to the customer's level of experience, from first-time university teams to experienced satellite manufacturers
• Develop and maintain onboarding material, welcome packs, training material and recorded sessions
• Maintain accurate records of each customer's hardware, including units, serial numbers, firmware versions and configuration, so that support is always given in context

Documentation and product improvement

• Write and maintain user-facing documentation, including getting started guides, integration and operating manuals, application notes, troubleshooting guides and release notes
• Analyse support trends to identify the recurring causes of customer difficulty, and feed these back to the Technical Product Owners as prioritised improvement requests
• Work with product owners and the software team to make ground support tools and product interfaces more intuitive, with the explicit goal of reducing the support volume over time

Reporting and continuous improvement

• Report on support performance, including response and resolution times, first line resolution rate, escalation rate, engineering time consumed by support and customer satisfaction
• Contribute to the continual improvement of the sales and support process and its supporting documentation

Requirements

• BEng, BSc Eng, BTech or National Diploma in Electronic, Electrical, Computer or Mechatronic Engineering, or an equivalent technical qualification
• At least 2 years' experience in a customer-facing technical role such as technical support, applications engineering, field service, test or systems integration.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, with a demonstrable ability to write clear technical material for an international audience.
• Strong organisational skills and a methodical approach to record keeping and issue tracking
• Willingness to accommodate customer time zones outside standard office hours on occasion, particularly during launch and commissioning campaigns
• A valid passport and willingness to travel internationally from time to time

Technical Skills

• A sound understanding of RF and digital communication fundamentals, including link budgets, modulation and coding schemes, forward error correction, EIRP and G/T, S-band, X-band and Ka-band operation
• The ability to read and interpret schematics, interface control documents, acceptance test reports and telemetry logs.
• Practical laboratory skills with spectrum analysers, signal generators, vector signal analysers and power meters, including the ability to reproduce reported customer issues on the bench
• Comfortable working with version control and collaboration tooling such as Git, Jira, Confluence, Slack and Markdown.
• Working understanding of FPGA firmware and embedded C, sufficient to read, debug and reason about device-level behaviour when supporting customer issues

Advantageous Skills

• Familiarity with satellite communication standards and protocols such as DVB-S2 and CCSDS
• Familiarity with typical embedded and spacecraft interfaces such as UART, RS-422 and RS-485, I2C, SPI, CAN, LVDS, SERDES, Spacewire and Ethernet.
• Scripting ability, preferably in Python, for log analysis, test automation and simple customer-facing utilities.
• Working knowledge of ground station software and orbital basics, for example GNU Radio, SatNOGS, Gpredict, two-line elements and pass prediction, would be an advantage