Flight Dynamics - Intern/Engineer

Role: Flight Dynamics - Intern/Engineer

Location: Bangalore/Ahmedabad

Experience: 0-2 years - we are open to hire interns as well as full time employees, depending on your experience (please note, that our internship program requires six months of on-site availability. Please apply only if you can commit to this duration).

About the Role: 

We are seeking a Flight Dynamics Engineer to take end-to-end ownership of orbit determination and downstream flight dynamics activities for a SAR satellite constellation. You will be responsible for ensuring that the spacecraft’s orbit knowledge meets the needs of the spacecraft’s mission and production of SAR data products.

Responsibilities:

Flight Dynamics & Orbit Determination

• Own orbit determination using onboard GNSS and/or ground-based processing.
• Evaluate current orbit state, propagate orbits, and assess post-manoeuvre orbit changes.
• Support manoeuvre planning, execution assessment, and post-burn analysis.
• Maintain orbit knowledge quality and performance metrics across the mission lifetime.

SAR Payload Support

• Work closely with Payload and Mission teams to ensure attitude and orbit knowledge meets SAR and InSAR product requirements.
• Support persistent orbit control, repeatability, and accuracy considerations relevant to SAR imaging geometry.
• Translate orbit and attitude errors into mission-level and data-quality impacts.

Operations & Commissioning Interface

• Act as the technical authority for flight dynamics during:

-LEOP,

-commissioning,

-anomaly investigations.

• Work closely with the Mission Operations team, defining:

-what is safe and permissible,

-mode usage constraints,

-manoeuvre and pointing rules.

• Support anomaly diagnosis and recovery related to orbit behaviour.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering or a closely related field.
• Spaceflight experience is not mandatory, but experience in one or more of the following will enhance your application:

-satellite missions,

-CubeSat or research spacecraft programs,

-space agency or commercial mission support,

-internship/project/thesis work tied to spacecraft or flight experiments.

• Strong fundamentals in:

-orbit mechanics and propagation,

-state estimation (e.g. filtering, residual analysis).

• Ability and willingness to own operational outcomes, not just theoretical modelling or analysis.

Desired Qualifications (Nice to Have, Not Required)

• Hands-on use of mission analysis or dynamics tools (e.g. MATLAB, Python, STK, GMAT, Orekit, custom pipelines).
• Experience with GNSS-based orbit determination or precise orbit knowledge.
• Familiarity with SAR or EO missions, or an understanding of how dynamics errors affect data products.
• Exposure to propulsion system interactions with orbit determination and control.

Soft Skills & Attitude

• Comfortable operating at the boundary between theory and hardware reality.
• Willing to make decisions under uncertainty and schedule pressure.
• Clear communicator who can explain complex dynamics to non-specialists.
• Curious, adaptable, and motivated to build capability from first principles.
• Interested in growing the function over time — not just executing a narrow task.