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Job Description

Role: Program Manager

Employment Type: Full Time

About the Role

At Pixxel, our Program Managers are the custodians of mission success. They own and drive every aspect of a mission — from planning and budgeting, to risk management, reviews, and reporting — ensuring that our spacecraft are launched on time, on budget, and in alignment with mission objectives. This role requires a rare mix of technical understanding, operational excellence, and stakeholder management to keep missions moving seamlessly from concept to successful on-orbit operations.

Key Responsibilities

Primary Ownership Areas:

● Mission Budgets: Own mission budgets end-to-end, including recalculations, rebalances, reconciliations with finance, and tracking actual spends across the mission lifecycle.

● Risk Management: Own and update the missionʼs risk register; regularly assess technical and non-technical risks; ensure timely decisions on acceptance/rejection of risks.

● Timelines & Milestones: Define, plan, and own mission timelines in coordination with systems engineering; set milestones and drive teams to achieve them within the cycle; regularly track backlog, open tickets, and deliverables.

● Vendor/Partner Coordination: Track and manage critical path items with vendors/partners; remove roadblocks in vendor selection and execution; ensure timely delivery of external inputs.

● Mission Reviews: Plan and orchestrate reviews SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, FRR, etc.) to ensure alignment of technical understanding and momentum towards milestones.

● Updates & Reporting: Deliver clear, actionable, and regular updates to internal and external stakeholders; provide decision-enabling reports and summaries.

● Proposals: When not deployed on a live mission, support the development of proposals for upcoming mission opportunities.

Secondary / Support Areas:

● Launch Coordination: Work with launch service providers on schedules, payload integration, and compatibility.

● Technical Oversight: Provide oversight across the mission lifecycle, from design reviews to integration and testing.

● Quality Profile: Partner with QA/QC to flag design/manufacturing issues early, balancing optimization with cost/time efficiency.

● Compliance: Ensure regulatory requirements (frequency, imaging, operations licenses) are met in time.

● Documentation: Support systems engineering and subsystems in maintaining accurate and timely documentation.

● Mission Objectives: Ensure mission objectives and Level 1 requirements are tracked from planning through on-orbit operations, in collaboration with systems engineering.

● Purchasing/Payments/Logistics: Coordinate with finance and supply chain to ensure payments, purchases, and logistics align with mission needs.

Success Criteria

The performance of a Program Manager will be measured through:

● Quality and timeliness of mission reviews SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, FRR.

● Adherence to mission budget and timelines.

● Effective risk management and issue resolution.

● Successful launch and on-orbit performance of the spacecraft.

Qualifications & Experience

● Experience in program/project management, ideally in aerospace, space systems, or other high-complexity engineering domains.

● Strong technical background with the ability to engage meaningfully with engineers across subsystems.

● Proven experience managing budgets, schedules, and risks for multi-stakeholder projects.

● Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

● Familiarity with space mission lifecycles (concept, design, manufacturing, integration, testing, launch, operations) is highly desirable.

● PMP/Prince2 or similar certification is a plus.

Benefits:

Health insurance coverage

Unlimited leaves & flexible working hours

Role-based remote work and work-from-home benefit

Relocation assistance

Professional Mental Wellness Services

Creche facility for primary caregivers (limited to India)

Employee Stock Options for all hires

About Pixxel

Pixxel is a space data company and spacecraft manufacturer redefining Earth observation with hyperspectral imaging. The company’s first three commercial hyperspectral satellites—Fireflies—deliver imagery at 5-meter resolution and 135+ spectral bands, providing 50x richer detail than traditional Earth observation systems and unlocking insights across agriculture, climate, energy, environment, and more.

Once fully deployed, Pixxel’s constellation of 18-24 satellites will capture imagery across up to 250 bands in VNIR and SWIR ranges, with a 40 km swath and daily global revisit capability. Pixxel’s most unique strength is its full-stack approach, integrating every layer of the value chain from satellite hardware and manufacturing to AI-powered analytics.

Pixxel’s satellite constellation is complemented by Aurora, its in-house Earth Observation Studio that simplifies satellite imagery analysis and democratises remote sensing for all. Designed to make hyperspectral data more accessible, Aurora by Pixxel combines high-frequency imagery with AI-powered tools to generate actionable insights, even for users without technical backgrounds. The third pillar of Pixxel’s ecosystem is its in-house satellite manufacturing capability. Beyond building its own spacecraft, Pixxel also provides satellite systems and subsystems to other organisations. This dual capacity sets it apart in a sector where most companies focus on either payload design or data operations, but not both.

Pixxel’s team is young but deeply mission-aligned, with a culture rooted in curiosity, speed, and long-term thinking. As the company grows its constellation and expands Aurora, the focus remains on making space-based insights practical, scalable, and genuinely helpful so that the health of the planet becomes measurable and action becomes possible.

Pixxel was the only Indian startup selected for the Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator in Los Angeles and has been recognised in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Via Satellite’s Top Innovators list.

For more information, see ourCareers page or follow Pixxel onLinkedIn andX/Twitter.

Culture

Pixxel is an organization where we enable our employees to work on world-changing problems that they are passionate about, and a place where they can be their best selves day in and day out while ensuring they have fun every day.

Central to our employee-first ethos is a commitment to ensuring that every team member feels valued and heard. We nurture a healthy and supportive work environment where we prioritise well-being and growth in all aspects of life

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