VP Ground Segment

Job description

Team & Reporting Line: CTO

Our Mission 

At constellr, we use thermal intelligence from space to understand what is happening on Earth - where, when and at scale. Our satellite constellation delivers high-resolution land surface temperature data, giving governments, defence organisations, commercial operators and global institutions the intelligence they need to monitor change, assess risk and make better-informed decisions.

From national security and critical infrastructure to agriculture and climate resilience, constellr turns temperature into actionable intelligence for a changing world.

Your Role

As VP Ground Segment, you own the latency from order to delivered product and drive constellr toward near real-time insights from space at scale.

You lead the department as one agile software organisation covering tasking, mission control, imaging and flight operations, data processing, data catalogue and cloud infrastructure. You'll work closely with our mission and flight operations specialists, who bring deep space domain expertise. You also own the outside interface to our data: the platform and APIs through which customers and internal users order, track and access our data.

And you own the archive: every scene we have ever captured, catalogued and accessible through one API. It is a high-resolution thermal record of the world's physical assets, and one of the most valuable building blocks of the company.

Key responsibilities

• Own latency end to end, from customer order to delivered product, with a latency budget per step and a clear path to near real time.
• Lead the Ground Segment as one agile software organisation. Teams design, build and run their services over the full lifecycle. Prepare the architecture and organisation for the next satellite generations, so new sensors can be onboarded to the fleet.
• Own cost: the Ground Segment cost center, with a lifecycle budget, cloud spend and visibility on cost per delivered scene. Lead make-buy decisions.
• Own the data: storage, catalogue and archive, fully accessible through the API. Support building thermal digital twins of physical assets on Earth, the basis for our AI and analytics products.
• Provide high-level technical leadership: drive the big-picture architecture, technical roadmap and alignment across teams. Optimise interface design for space programme requirement flowdown (upstream) and agile data product development (downstream).
• Provide the ground processing runtime as an internal platform with excellent developer experience for the data teams, so new algorithms can be deployed at scale.
• Run cloud and infrastructure with a security baseline that meets government and defence requirements.
• Own observability: every KPI is computed from live data on the Ground Segment dashboard.

Job requirements

About you 

Required: 

• You have led software or data organisations with several agile teams, ideally more than 20 engineers.
• You have built and led platforms where latency and reliability are the product, such as streaming data, geospatial, maps, real-time analytics or large-scale cloud services.
• You have owned latency and reliability targets end to end. You know how to break a promise to customers into budgets per team, keep observability on KPIs, and communicate efficiently with both C-level and individual contributors.
• You have built and run cloud-based, data-intensive systems at scale, including storage, pipelines and cost management.
• You are comfortable building with constrained budgets and making pragmatic make-buy decisions, without relying on large internal tooling or platform teams.
• You lead with clear purpose and accountability for every team, and you care about the people who do the work. You have a track record of efficient change management, moving R&D-led organisations to agile software teams.
• Excellent English communication skills.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in New Space, satellite operations or ground segment. If you come from outside the space industry, you're eager to learn the operational side quickly alongside our mission and flight operations team.
• German language skills.

Why join constellr?

• High-Impact National Security Mission: Be part of an ambitious mission to launch the world’s first commercial thermal infrared constellation, delivering sovereign-grade "behavioural" intelligence from space to close critical blind spots for defence, intelligence, and maritime surveillance agencies.
• Fast-Paced "New Space" Innovation: Work at the leading edge of a rapidly evolving defence sector. By leveraging modern, agile New Space methodologies, you will help design, build, and deploy dual-use thermal payloads into operational orbit at a speed and scale that traditional aerospace models simply cannot match.
• Broad Interdisciplinary Exposure: Accelerate your professional growth by collaborating daily with a diverse, international cohort of astrophysicists, software developers, and defence-system engineers.
• Inclusive & Scientific Culture: Join a high-trust team deeply committed to diversity, inclusion, and scientific excellence, where academic curiosity is paired with high autonomy and a flat hierarchy.
• Financial Upside & Well-being: Benefit from a Virtual Share Option Plan (VSOP) for permanent employees, giving you a true stake in the company's growth, alongside highly flexible hybrid working models.