Technical Support Engineer (Aerospace)

Helderberg Personnel CC; Stellenbosch; On-site; ZAR 420,000 - 640,000; Full time

Job summary

Helderberg Personnel Cc is seeking an experienced technical support engineer in Stellenbosch. You will be the first contact for post-sales technical queries across our product range, classify and resolve issues, and escalate only when design input is needed.

You will help build a forum, knowledge base, and onboarding materials to improve self-service for customers. You will own tickets through resolution, maintain accurate hardware records, and contribute to product documentation and continuous

Qualifications

• BEng, BSc Eng, BTech or National Diploma in Electronic, Electrical, Computer or Mechatronic Engineering or equivalent
• At least 2 years' experience in a customer-facing technical role such as technical support or field service
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English for an international audience
• Strong organisational skills and methodical record keeping and issue tracking
• Willingness to work across time zones and travel internationally
• Passport and willingness to travel internationally occasionally

Responsibilities

• Serve as the first line of post-sales technical support for our customer base
• Screen, classify and prioritise incoming support requests and resolve most issues independently
• Escalate complex issues to engineering while retaining ownership of the ticket
• Develop a customer support forum and knowledge base with an integrated ticketing system
• Onboard new customers and tailor training to their experience level
• Maintain customer hardware records and configurations for context in support
• Publish user-facing docs, troubleshooting guides and release notes
• Report on support performance and drive continuous improvement

Skills

RF fundamentals

Schematic reading

Laboratory skills

Version control

Embedded C

Education

Engineering degree or diploma

Tools

Git

Jira

Confluence

Slack

Markdown

Job description

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