Senior Systems Engineer

What you'll do

• Own the system architecture and system model for Hypersonica’s high‑speed flight vehicles, ensuring mission intent, vehicle dynamics, avionics, and GNC form a coherent, verifiable whole.

• Lead aerospace systems architecture design, taking responsibility for how the vehicle is defined across disciplines from early concept through Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and beyond.

• Build and maintain the authoritative system requirements model, decomposing mission‑level objectives into clear, testable system and sub‑system requirements.

• Define and own the end‑to‑end system V‑model, including requirements validation, verification strategy, and clear readiness gates for Kick‑off and PDR.

• Apply model‑based systems engineering (MBSE) as a practical engineering tool, not a documentation exercise, ensuring traceability between requirements, models, analyses, and tests.

• Develop and deliver a 6‑DoF Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) model to PDR standard, in close collaboration with flight physics and avionics engineers.

• Apply closed‑loop control theory in the context of high‑speed flight and military guidance, ensuring controllability, stability, and performance are understood at the system level.

• Integrate vehicle dynamics, control laws, sensors, and actuators into a coherent closed‑loop system representation.

• Identify system‑level risks early particularly around requirements gaps, controllability, observability, and verification — and drive mitigations decisively.

• Act as a technical authority across disciplines, keeping architectural decisions coherent as designs evolve at pace.

Who you are

• An experienced Systems Engineer with a strong track record in system architecture, requirements decomposition, and delivery in safety‑ or mission‑critical environments.

• Deeply fluent in model‑based systems engineering, with practical experience owning requirements models and using MBSE to drive real engineering decisions.

• Strong grounding in closed‑loop control theory, applied to high‑speed flight, guidance, and defence or military systems.

• Comfortable developing and working with 6‑DoF flight and GNC models, and understanding their implications at vehicle level.

• Experienced taking systems through early design gates (Kick‑off, PDR), not just theoretical or paper studies.

• Someone who thinks in system behaviours, interfaces, and failure modes, not isolated components.

• Confident operating in ambiguous, fast‑moving environments where decisions must be made with incomplete data.

• Technically credible across disciplines, able to challenge assumptions and close decisions without consensus theatre.

• Motivated by working on systems where performance, robustness, and national‑level impact genuinely matter.

Security and Elgibility Requirement

Due to the nature of the work with the UK MOD, applicants must be a British Citizen (or Dual UK national with British citizenship) and eligible for UK Security Clearance (SC) and, where required, Developed Vetting (DV)

What we offer

• A mission driven environment with the opportunity to work on one of Europe’s most consequential defence challenges, with direct impact on sovereign capability and security.

• Daily collaboration with top experts across engineering, operations, and defence, with real opportunity to learn from the best, contribute, and grow.

• High ownership and autonomy; no time tracking, no micromanagement, just clear objectives and accountability for outcomes.

• A fast paced environment where good ideas are implemented quickly, and feedback from test and flight drives real decisions.

• A culture that values clarity, integrity, and excellence, and supports people who take initiative and push boundaries responsibly.

• Competitive compensation and real share options aligned to responsibility and impact, not tenure or hierarchy.