Role highlights

Location: Valencia (Paterna), Spain

Department: [confirm department/LoB]

Reports to: VP Engineering, ICEYE Spain

Employment type: Permanent

Workplace model: Onsite, in the room with the team

SUPO: Employment is subject to applicable security screening. Parts of this work fall under export control.

Why this role matters

ICEYE builds radar satellites, and nobody yet knows where AI turns a week of hardware design into an afternoon. The vendors who claim to know are mostly wrong. So we're setting up a five-person skunkworks in Valencia to find out, by building real hardware with AI - outside of the program schedules with a pure focus on finding the things that “move the needle”.

You'll hire the team of four or five builders and build alongside them. "Lead" here means first builder. You get a room next to the lab and a budget you spend without an approval process, and the team keeps two standing obligations: build something every week and show it to the rest of ICEYE every month.

Who We Are

ICEYE is the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space. We deliver persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth.

ICEYE owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation. To our customers we provide intelligence with unmatched quality, latency and revisit times, in any weather, day or night. To governments who choose to operate their own constellation we provide this proven capability as a sovereign system.

ICEYE-built constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future.

Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

Your day-to-day responsibilities

Build the team: bring in 4 to 5 builders covering electrical (power and digital), RF, mechanical, and agents and tooling. You choose them, and the sponsor holds a veto.

Pick the problems and build them yourself: work only on real design intent, with real frequency bands, power levels, launch loads and interfaces. Think a representative X-band receive chain, a payload power distribution board, a bracket family or a digital backend. Toy problems teach us nothing about where AI breaks.

Run the bet portfolio: keep six to ten live bets, each with an owner and a one-line "this is dead if". The team reviews them monthly and decides to continue, graduate or kill. Roughly a third should die each quarter, including yours.

Hold the budget and spend it: you have full budget authority, with a same-day conversation with the sponsor for anything above 50k. Spend is reported in one table on the demo day slide, and that is the whole finance process.

Get what works into production hands: a capability has graduated when an engineer outside the team uses it without you in the room. That takes a working tool, a one-page how-to, the notebook pages behind it, and one of your people sitting with the receiving team for a month.

Run the team rhythm: something physical or runnable every week, and a public demo day every month that anyone at ICEYE can walk into. Failures get shown too, because they usually teach more.

You won't write status reports or sit on steering committees. Spending below the limits needs nobody's permission.

What we're looking for

We're looking for a tinkerer who finishes things. Both halves matter equally, and the combination is rare. You probably have a bench at home with something on it nobody asked for, and it works. You also have a day job designing real hardware to real requirements, so you know the difference between a clever prototype and a thing that survives launch.

Must haves

Hardware you designed and shipped yourself (circuit boards, RF chains, mechanisms or structures, any one of them), taken from intent to something measured on a bench

Instincts that come from hardware that got built, measured and signed off, including the judgement to tell when a simulation is lying to you