SATCOM Systems Engineer

A NATO organisation in Braine-l'Alleud is looking for a satellite communications engineer who can take a solution from an operational requirement all the way to acceptance testing. You would be the technical lead on acquisition projects: writing the specification, supporting evaluation, holding the design together through implementation, and supervising the testing at the end of it.

What you would be doing

• Providing technical leadership to acquisition projects — integrated, interoperable solutions, technical specifications, evaluation support and acceptance testing.
• Contributing to solution architectures, evaluating alternatives and the trade-offs in cost, performance and scalability, and documenting the decisions that matter.
• Aligning solutions with the enterprise and solution architecture standards, security included.
• Defining and managing scoping, requirements and prioritisation; reviewing requirements for errors and omissions; documenting traceability and handling authorised changes to the baseline.
• Planning and driving systems development projects, selecting the methods and tools, reporting progress and building road maps for what comes next.
• Preparing pre-qualification questionnaires and tender invitations, producing detailed evaluation criteria for complex tenders and evaluating them.
• Acting as the routine technical contact point with suppliers on contract management.
• Overseeing design reviews, making sure the design balances functional and non-functional requirements, and managing the associated risks.
• Driving systems integration, test and acceptance — including automation and continuous integration — and giving authoritative advice on any part of it.
• Making sure SATCOM project proposals line up with NATO operational requirements, interoperability standards and future capability needs.

What they are looking for

• A Bachelor's degree in a related discipline with three years of relevant experience.
• At least three years of practical SATCOM experience across the UHF and SHF domains.
• Deep knowledge of SATCOM architecture — budget calculation for a link, the modulation choices, coding that corrects errors, and how satellite networks are laid out.
• Strong radio-frequency engineering, and antennas — modelling how the signal travels in the bands SATCOM uses, and knowing what degrades it and what to do about that.
• SATCOM cybersecurity architecture principles, including encryption and secure communications design.
• Familiarity with DVB-S2 and DVB-S2X, MIL-STD-188, and software defined networking in SATCOM environments.
• Familiarity with modern military communication networks — interfaces, protocols and operational environments.
• Experience writing, analysing and commenting on technical documents, and the communication skills to make complex SATCOM concepts land with a non-specialist audience.

Nice to have

• A Master's in telecommunications engineering with five years of relevant experience.
• Deployable CIS and Infrastructure as a Service, systems engineering and MBSE, and ITIL v4 Foundation.
• Recognised systems engineering or MBSE training or certification.
• An international environment with both military and civilian colleagues, and an understanding of NATO operational standards and procedures.

Practical detail

• Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium — full time on site, normal office environment.
• 28 September to 31 December 2026, 600 hours in total.
• Graded at the equivalent of NATO G15.
• You must hold a valid clearance and be a citizen of a NATO member country with the right to work in Belgium.

If link budgets and antenna work are your natural territory and you enjoy being the person who signs off that a system does what it promised, this is a strong one.