Vehicle Performance Engineer

About the company

Portal Space Systems develops solar thermal propulsion systems for high-speed in-space maneuvering.

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><h3>About Portal</h3> <p>Portal Space Systems is on a mission to expand humanity’s freedom of movement in space. We’re building the spacecraft that makes that mission possible. From our Bothell, WA headquarters, we design vehicles with the maneuverability, resilience, and adaptability needed for the next era of orbital operations. Every system we build is in service of a simple idea: space should be more accessible, responsive, and capable. Joining Portal means stepping into a team that believes in bold engineering, fast iteration, and the power of small groups to change what’s possible. If you want your work to directly shape the future of in-space mobility, join us.</p></div><h1>Position Summary</h1> <p>The Vehicle Performance Engineer creates the integrated, quantitative view of spacecraft health and mission performance used by engineering leadership, program managers, and executives. This systems and data-integration role connects analysis results, engineering budgets, test data, and flight telemetry across disciplines; resolves data definitions and interfaces; and develops intuitive performance dashboards and graphical tools. Subsystem owners remain responsible for the technical correctness of their source data. The Vehicle Performance Engineer owns consolidation, traceability, visualization, trend identification, and high-level cross-disciplinary performance assessments.</p> <h1>Responsibilities</h1> <ul> <li>Define the data architecture, interfaces, update cadence, and governance needed to create a reliable integrated view of spacecraft performance.</li> <li>Integrate mass, power, energy, thermal, propulsion, delta-V, GNC, specific impulse, test telemetry, and other mission-performance datasets.</li> <li>Develop and maintain spacecraft performance dashboards and graphical user interfaces using Python-based tools, Grafana, or comparable technologies.</li> <li>Determine where automated or live data pipelines provide value and where controlled periodic imports are more appropriate.</li> <li>Work with subsystem owners to establish authoritative sources, common definitions, units, assumptions, metadata, and configuration traceability.</li> <li>Consolidate subsystem budgets and margins without replacing the technical ownership of the contributing disciplines.</li> <li>Identify missing, stale, inconsistent, or conflicting data and drive resolution with the appropriate owners.</li> <li>Create leadership-level indicators that communicate vehicle health, margin trends, readiness, and mission capability for spacecraft on the ground and in orbit.</li> <li>Perform high-level cross-disciplinary trade studies, sensitivity analyses, and “what-if” assessments using controlled source data.</li> <li>Compare predictions with test and flight results and highlight performance changes, emerging risks, or margin erosion.</li> <li>Build reusable data-processing, validation, visualization, and reporting tools.</li> <li>Provide integrated performance products for design reviews, test campaigns, qualification or acceptance reviews, flight readiness, and on-orbit operations.</li> <li>Document data lineage, calculation logic, assumptions, tool configuration, and known limitations so results are reproducible and auditable.</li> </ul> <h1>Basic Qualifications</h1> <ul> <li>Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, systems engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, data science, or a related technical discipline.</li> <li>2 + years of experience</li> </ul> <h1>Preferred Qualifications</h1> <ul> <li>Spacecraft systems engineering experience across multiple phases of a flight program.</li> <li>Experience with Python data and visualization libraries such as pandas, Plotly, Dash, Streamlit, or equivalent tools.</li> <li>Experience with Grafana, time-series databases, SQL, APIs, telemetry pipelines, or automated engineering workflows.</li> <li>Experience integrating spacecraft test telemetry or on-orbit telemetry with analytical predictions and engineering limits.</li> <li>Familiarity with configuration management, technical performance measures, requirements verification, and formal design reviews.</li> <li>Experience with spacecraft mission analysis, propulsion performance, power and energy modeling, or GNC performance metrics.</li> <li>Experience in spacecraft systems engineering, spacecraft performance analysis, engineering data integration, data science, or data engineering.</li> <li>Ability to connect and reconcile datasets produced by multiple technical disciplines.</li> <li>Experience developing engineering dashboards, data visualizations, or decision-support tools using Python or Grafana.</li> <li>Working knowledge of spacecraft subsystems and the relationships among mass, power, energy, thermal, propulsion, GNC, and mission performance, or demonstrated ability to learn these domains quickly.</li> <li>Experience performing quantitative trade studies, trend analysis, data validation, or technical performance assessment.</li> <li>Ability to translate complex technical results into clear, decision-useful information for engineering and nontechnical leadership.</li> </ul> <h1>Work Expectations</h1> <ul> <li>This role works closely with every spacecraft subsystem and regularly presents results to engineering leadership, program management, and executive stakeholders.</li> <li>The successful candidate may come from spacecraft systems engineering or from data science or data engineering with a strong interest in learning spacecraft systems.</li> </ul><div class="content-conclusion"><div class="cms-body__content-block"> <h3 class="h2">ITAR Statement</h3> <div class="cms-static-wrapper"> <div class="p-m"> <p>This position may involve access to technical data and defense-related materials controlled under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). <strong>Eligibility to access ITAR-controlled items requires that candidates be U.S. persons</stro