Forward Deployed Operator

You'll own end-to-end operational performance across a rotating set of projects. In a given month, you might:

• Run point on a military exercise — coordinating with engineering on tech readiness, manufacturing on hardware volume, and the Flight Control team on in-flight priorities, then closing the loop with the customer on results.

• Coordinate the operational rollout of new hardware, like ocean sensing buoys or radio ground stations.

• Identify recurring bugs that affect performance constellation-wide.

• Oversee our constellation’s response to a newly-appeared tropical storm – gathering the most interesting data while ensuring avoidance of other meteorological aircraft in the region, creating visualizations of our findings and communicating them to others.

• Travel all over the world to carry out unusual operations – whether that’s slogging through a swamp in Alabama to recover a balloon, or setting up a temporary launch site on an island in rural Scotland.

The work varies widely. Some weeks you're heads-down on documentation and tooling; other weeks you're trying to shepherd a cluster of twenty balloons across the Pacific. Most weeks are somewhere in between.

Skills and Qualifications

• When a procedure doesn't exist, you write it instead of waiting to be told it's your job. You like keeping a lot of balls in the air, and you’re ready to dive into anything that needs to be done.

• Genuine curiosity about how the world works. The job involves balloons, atmospheric science, radio, airspace, and defense tech — you don't need a background in any of these, but you should find them interesting enough to want to learn.

• You can sit across from a customer who's never encountered our tech, and help them understand and trust the operations you’ve carried out. The constellation team is the part of ops that is in itself a product, and it matters how we present ourselves and communicate with external collaborators.

• Comfort with uncertainty and shifting priorities. Procedures evolve, hardware changes, customers reprioritize. You're someone who finds this energizing rather than exhausting.

Benefits

• 401(k)

• Dental insurance

• Health insurance

• Vision insurance

• Unlimited PTO

• Stock Option Plan

• Office food and beverages