Senior Program Manager, Ground Systems

  Senior Program Manager, Ground Systems  

About Us:

BlackSky is a geospatial intelligence solutions provider that enables organizations to task, collect, and transform data from earth observation, global sensor networks, mobile devices, and social media to deliver on-demand insights about places, events, and assets that are critical to their operations. BlackSky provides satellite collection, data, and cloud based -processing and analytic solutions to organizations that are capitalizing on the exponential growth of a wide range of sensor and collection platforms for delivering the next generation of GEOINT and location intelligence solutions. BlackSky has extensive expertise and capabilities in commercial remote sensing, multi-source analytics, cloud computing, open source software development, Amazon Web Services, and big data geospatial analytics. BlackSky provides solutions to commercial and government organizations with relevant programs with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), US. Army, and U.S. Air Force Research Labs.

BlackSky is looking for a program manager to build, development and optimize their global ground station network. This position helps to ensure the ground segment operates to its fullest potential and helps with the strategic expansion of the network. As a key member of the ground station team and a leader, you will balance engineering and program management trades and work across communications, software, test, and infrastructure engineering disciplines. The program manager is responsible for putting all the pieces of the site, from the construction plans to vendor management into an overall program plan for the ground infrastructure of the constellation.

The ideal candidate excels in an environment of competing priorities and has an instinctive ability to distill complex technical challenges into goals and directives that motivate a team and drive actionable results. The candidate has a demonstrated ability to think creatively about cost and schedule, considering the bigger picture ground network development. Additionally, the candidate is confident challenging assumptions from team members and vendors alike in favor of the best path to a program’s success and willing to dive into technical details as needed to work and understand a problem space. This position requires an independent thinker who is consistently striving to learn, grow, and lead. 

While the location listed in the job posting are ideal, we would love candidates near our Seattle, WA office. We may also consider remote candidates in certain states. 

Responsibilities:

• Manage, develop, and support vendor relationships with site partners to ensure uptime, maintenance support activities, and maintain production operation for BlackSky’s commercial ground station network.
• Develop, plan, and drive optimization into the site maintenance and support activities at operational ground station considering the requirements to support satellite operations.
• Evaluate and develop plans for new site locations, establish strategic partnerships and develop plans for new site launches to production in line with our capacity plans.
• Collaborate internally to communicate, commit, and champion new development efforts and sustainment efforts to keep the ground station network uptime needed to support the constellation.
• Build and manage the plan to test and validate the equipment ahead of site deployment and demonstrate risk reduction strategies. Work with cross-functional teams to pull burn down risk in the plan with testing and validation milestones.
• Optimize, define, and partner with internal teams to purchase, catalog, test, and track equipment across existing and upcoming sites. Define and develop processes that increase efficiency and manage cost to a budget.
• Support, define, and track the integrated hardware and software development plans with collaboration from Software Engineering Management.
• Serve as point of contact for the ground station equipment and resources and work to allocate them effectively amongst stakeholders, managing key business objectives and priorities.
• Other job-related duties as assigned. 

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum of five to eight years of relevant experience program managing or managing vendors with integrated software and hardware dependencies.
• Experience working with complex systems with hardware and integrated software dependencies.
• Experience working with integrated product teams. 
• Experience managing budgets, schedules, and developing resourced plans. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Possess strong team leadership and inter-team cooperation and organization skills.
• Experie