Description

Reporting directly to the Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, the Head of the Electrical Department is a member of the Directorate’s management team and participates in the decision-making process for all major activities covered by the Directorate.

Duties

You will actively work to ensure the well-being and motivation of the Department’s workforce, encouraging the flow of information and proactively coordinating with the Directorate’s other departments.

In addition, you will take an active role in fostering the development and training of the workforce with a view to maintaining the Agency’s high level of competence in the Department’s technical disciplines.

Together with the Director of D/TEC and your peers, you will actively contribute to ESA’s Agenda 2025. This will notably involve contributing to the Agency’s transformation towards greater efficiency, matrix strengthening, digitalisation and conscious risk-taking in order to manage the challenges that lie ahead for ESA.

You will be responsible, together with a team of Division Heads, for the management of activities, technical facilities and laboratories, as well as for maintaining excellence in the technical competencies of the Department.

Duties include:

• ensuring excellence in electrical technology development in support of institutional and commercial missions, including fostering space-related competencies across ESA Member States;
• providing state-of-the-art engineering support to ongoing and future ESA programmes and to European industry;
• formulating a vision for technology development;
• formulating a vision to retain and attract the best space engineering talent in the electrical domain, further increasing the diversity of ESA staff;
• stimulating the evolution of engineering activities and the Department laboratories;
• taking an active role in interacting with projects through technical reviews, procurement activities, in-orbit performance reviews and the development of lessons learned and engineering standards.

The above duties will be carried out in respect of all of the competences of the Electrical Department, which include E2E systems, antennas/payloads/instruments and RF/digital technologies for navigation, remote sensing, telecommunications, science, exploration missions, pre-commercial and commercial user segment, security and accreditation engineering, electromagnetic wave propagation, interactions and compatibility, space environments, power systems, on-board telemetry, tracking and command, payload data transmission, data handling for payload and platform computers and microelectronics and EEE component technologies.

You will be required to liaise with other ESA directorates to support their needs and strategy and to interact with entities outside the Agency (Member State delegations, industry, academia, international partners) in order to promote and develop ESA activities.

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward Thinking

Education

A master’s degree in a relevant engineering discipline is required for this post.

Additional requirements

Solid and proven experience in managing space activities in a multi-project environment, leading large teams and managing a wide range of infrastructure, such as technical facilities and laboratories.
Openness to change and the ability to lead change processes in a complex and versatile environment. Experience of change management in large organisations is a plus.
Proven track record of driving team performance, fostering cooperation across teams and stakeholders and developing and motivating people.
Excellent communication, relationship management, ambassadorship and leadership skills, coupled with knowledge of the internal operations of the Agency or a similar organisation, are required.
Demonstrated ability to synthesise technical and programmatic information, provide vision for technology development and stimulate the evolution of engineering activities is an essential pre-requisite.
You should also have:

• the ability to provide strategic direction to the individuals and teams within the Department and to relate team objectives to the overall, evolving organisational goals and context;
• the ability to anticipate problems, resolve complex issues and relate situations to their context;
• the ability to make solution-oriented, pragmatic and timely decisions of a high standard and with integrity and to support others (team members, upper management, other stakeholders) in this process.

International experience, i.e. outside your home country, as well as experience in diverse functional areas relevant to ESA activities would be an asset.