Lead Systems Engineer
Systems - Villeneuve, CH
The position
- Crew
- Systems
- 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. Neither LYOBA nor IBEX ships without one person owning the architecture, the interfaces, and the qualification path across both. That's the job.
Two vehicles are running in parallel and systems engineering has been carried as a third hat by one of our senior engineers. It's the constraint on both programmes. You'll inherit the function and formalise it under load, on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters.
You will own
System architecture and the technical baseline for LYOBA and IBEX
Requirements baseline and end-to-end traceability from mission needs to subsystem specs
Interfaces: internal ICDs across subsystems and external ones with launchers, customer payloads, and ground segment
V&V strategy and qualification path for each vehicle
System-level technical risk register and the plan to retire each item
Technical content of every review gate, SRR through FRR, across both programmes
What we are looking for
10+ years of systems engineering on large space programmes
At least one flight programme owned from PDR through qualification
Requirements decomposition and verification flow-down on a multi-subsystem vehicle: launcher, spacecraft, or upper stage
Deep working knowledge of propulsion-driven architectures, storable or cryogenic
Writing and defending ICDs with launcher providers and external customers
Hands-on with the artefacts: architecture diagrams, V&V matrices, risk registers. Not only reviewing them
Working knowledge of ECSS or NASA systems engineering standards and the judgement to know when to depart from them
English, fluently
Nice to have: kick stage or OTV experience, prior experience founding the systems engineering function on a programme rather than inheriting it.
You will fit if
You're comfortable being the senior technical voice in a room where the PMs own the schedule and you own whether the vehicle is sound.
You want to be on the floor with the engineers and at the test site when hardware fires, not running the function from a screen.
You can disagree with the CTO and the programme managers in the morning and ship a coherent decision by the afternoon.
You take matrix authority seriously, both the leverage it gives you and the discipline it demands.
You'd rather write the V&V matrix yourself than wait for someone else's draft.
The job is fully on-site in Villeneuve (VD), with our test site in Chavalon twenty minutes away. The systems engineering function exists informally today and you'll be standing it up while two programmes run. This is hard and early. If you want a mature systems engineering 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.