Dawn Aerospace is looking for a motivated Airframe Team Manager with a practical, can-do attitude to join our Spaceplane team in Delft, The Netherlands.

In this role, you will be responsible for a team of engineers located between our Delft and Christchurch offices and maintain a successful collaboration between yours and other teams. You will coordinate all aspects from design to testing of our spaceplanes while supporting the team’s growth.

You should be familiar with high growth environments, have a demonstrated history of good judgment in a highly technical field, and take ownership of tough challenges.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for resource management to build, organize and manage a high-performance Airframe design and production team.
• Provide (technical) leadership and guidance to the team members.
• Support when needed in design, production and test activities.
• Work with System Design Engineers and Project Managers to ensure all design and production data is accurate and complete.
• Setting up the work frame for the start of a new project.
• Project management: Budgeting, Scheduling of design and production work.
• Overlooking and checking structural work.
• Detailing out interfaces between the sub-teams of the spaceplane.

Required qualifications

• A degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, Physics or similar.
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in project management or team lead activities on highly complex systems such as aircrafts, spacecrafts, cars, autonomous vehicles, or military equipment.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor and grow staff.
• Experience in translating long-term goals into action plans.
• Experience in organizing a team, overseeing workload and setting of priorities.
• A real team player with strong interpersonal skills and a strong quality orientation.
• Strong written and oral communication skills and a dedication to achieving results on time.
• CAD experience.
• Design for lightweight structures.
• Structural design experience.
• FEA Experience in composite and metallic structures.
• A good command of English, both written and spoken.
• Willingness to travel and spend periods in New-Zealand.

Desired experience

• Familiar with aircraft design standard.
• Experience with SolidWorks.
• Composite design and manufacturing.
• Used to working with a geographically widespread team.

About Dawn Aerospace

Dawn Aerospace is a space transportation company with a purpose.
Our mission is to enable the next generation of space users by providing more sustainable and scalable ways to access and move around in space. We believe this access, in the form of a transportation network, will fundamentally change what’s possible from space. We currently focus on two areas of space transportation:

- In-space propulsion
We're a leading supplier of turnkey green propulsion systems for various classes of satellites. Our system utilise safe, accessible propellants and we have over 50 of these propulsion units on 12 operational satellites already. A further 200 units are in production.

- Space launch
Our Mk-II Aurora spaceplane demonstrator has completed 50 successful flights and we recently completed the first campaign utilising rocket engines. Mk-II is unique in that it combines the performance of a rocket and the rapid reusability and economic model of an aircraft.

Our international teams are distributed across three locations: New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the USA.

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Important!

If you think you have what it takes but are unsure that you check every box, we still want to hear from you. For any questions you might have before applying or if you would like to have a general conversation about Dawn Aerospace, you can contact our Recruiter, Anna Thouvenin at a.thouvenin@dawnaerospace.com.