Quality / Product Assurance Lead
Quality - Villeneuve, CH
The position
- Crew
- Quality
- 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. Real hardware, real funding, real milestones, and the first parts flying soon. That's the programme. You're the discipline behind every part of it that has to be defensible.
The quality function has been carried as a side job by the engineers building the hardware. That works at twenty people, breaks at sixty, and PAVE Space is past forty. The first customer audit is coming, the first insurer questions are landing, and the qualification campaigns need a real Product Assurance owner. You'll formalise it, on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters.
You will own
The Product Assurance programme for Space, Launch and Ground segments; qualification, acceptance, flight pedigree
The Quality Management System: processes, framework, and the path to potential certifications
Non-conformance handling, root cause and corrective actions at flight-hardware level
Supplier quality programme; qualification, surveillance, incoming inspection
Insurer interface; the documentation, qualification evidence, and discipline that earns coverage on real terms
Configuration management and traceability: what part, what batch, what build, what test
What we are looking for
8+ years of product assurance or quality leadership on space, aerospace, or other high-reliability hardware programmes
Direct experience standing up certifications, not inheriting a mature one
Track record managing institutional or commercial customer audits and qualification reviews
Supplier quality experience at vehicle scale, including incoming inspection on critical hardware
Hands-on with non-conformance and root-cause discipline at flight-hardware level
Comfortable being the PA voice in a design review when the schedule says ship and the data says wait
ECSS, NASA, or AS9100 working knowledge and the judgement to know when to depart from them
English, fluently; French strongly preferred
Experience certifying a small organisation to AS9100
Experience with insurer or underwriter conversations on flight hardware
Quality on propulsion or pressurised systems
Experience standing up PA as a function rather than inheriting an established one.
You will fit if
You'd rather write the NCR yourself than wait for someone else's draft.
You see the QMS as a tool people actually use, not a binder on a shelf.
You can disagree with a PM on a shipping decision and still be on the same side of the engineering problem the next morning.
You know "tailored from ECSS" is the answer to most questions, not "by-the-book ECSS."
You take pride in the audit that goes smoothly because the artefacts were already there.
Fully on-site in Villeneuve (VD), with our test site in Chavalon twenty minutes away. There's no QMS to inherit, no audit binder on the shelf, no PA team underneath you. You'd be the one building it, while the first customers start asking to see it.
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.