Kick Stage Programme Manager
Programme - Villeneuve, CH
The position
- Crew
- Programme
- Location
- Villeneuve, CH
- Type of contract
- Full-time
Your role
PAVE Space is building LYOBA, a heavy kick stage moving over 4-tonne payloads from LEO to high-energy orbits in under 24 hours. LYOBA is the flagship programme and right now the CTO is carrying it. That's the job we need you to take.
LYOBA's WBS, schedule, and risk register need to live outside one person's head and become artefacts the board, the customers, and the engineers can all work from. You'll inherit a programme that's real but informal, and your job is to make it legible and on-track, on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters.
You will own
LYOBA's WBS, schedule, risk register, and change control end to end
The LYOBA programme cadence: weeklies, monthly reviews, milestone gates with the board
The single technical-programme interface between PAVE Space and LYOBA's reservation customers
Cross-functional alignment with the Systems Engineering Lead, Systems teams, and Head of Operations
Translating the programme state into one source of truth that works for three audiences: board, customer, and a new engineer on their first day
Feeding the commercial team with credible scope, schedule, and cost estimates for customer proposals
What we are looking for
8+ years of programme management on flagship space programmes
At least one programme owned from kickoff through qualification, not just one phase
WBS, schedule, and risk management at vehicle scale, not only subsystem
Direct experience as the customer-facing technical-programme lead, including binding scope discussions
Comfortable challenging engineering assumptions without owning the engineering decision
You know where the line sits between programme authority and technical authority, and you respect both sides of it
English, fluently
Nice to have: French fluency, kick stage or upper stage or OTV experience, prior experience standing up programme management as a function rather than inheriting an established PMO.
You will fit if
You'd rather make a date credible than make it sound good.
You want to be in the room with the engineers when the schedule gets argued about, not running the programme from a dashboard.
You can hold a customer line on Tuesday and challenge an engineer's lead-time on Wednesday without losing either of them.
You're allergic to risk registers that haven't been touched in a month, and you'd rather rewrite the schedule yourself than wait for someone else's draft.
You take programme authority seriously, and you know the moments to push back on a technical decision and the moments to defer to the Systems Engineering Lead.
The job is fully on-site in Villeneuve (VD), with our test site in Chavalon twenty minutes away. The programme management function is being formalised as you take the seat — there's no PMO to lean on. This is hard and early. If you want a mature programme management org with established processes, this is the wrong seat. If you want to set those processes for the most ambitious space programme in Switzerland, it's the right one.
We are building to ship, grounded on real hardware, real funding, real milestones. Apply to contribute, surrounded by people as sharp as you are. And if this isn't you but you know that person, send them our way.