We are looking for an Engineer with experience in scheduling and control of Space ground segment projects. The engineer will support two Science Ground Segment projects that are currently in development and require support in the area of schedule engineering and control: Herschel and Gaia. Both projects will require about the same amount of support, i.e. 0.5 fte each.

HERSCHEL
The Science ground segment for the HERSCHEL mission consists of the HERSCHEL Science Centre (HSC) plus three Instrument Control Centres (ICC), one per instrument, plus a NASA HERSCHEL Science Center ((NHSC). ESA is responsible for the HSC development and operations plus has the oversight of the overall science ground segment development. The purpose of this work package is to provide schedule engineering support to the HSC development project. The requested support is to be provided until launch plus 1 year (launch is currently foreseen for late 2008).

Specific tasks include:

• Maintenance of the project schedules.
• Liaison and cooperation with the Satellite project, the HSC Development Team, the HSC Operations Team, ICC’s, and the NHSC to establish milestones and other dependencies relevant to the project.
• Maintenance of work packages for the development team.
• Monitoring and reporting of the progress and performance of the work packages
• Analysis of schedules and resource deployment to assess feasibility and determine critical areas requiring special attention.
• Supporting the project management by providing progress and activity reports.
• Supporting of project management by participation in scheduling related project activities (reviews, management meetings, configuration control boards) and by updating project management related documentation.

Gaia
The Gaia mission is planning to map to microarcsecond accuracy 1% of the stellar population of our galaxy - that is around one thousand million objects. Each object will be seen about 100 times over the five year mission. The data reduction of the ~100 Terabytes of downlinked data is estimated to require a Petabyte storage system. The Gaia launch date is set for late 2011.

The processing will be a community wide effort performed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) in which ESAC play both a coordination and collaborative development role.
The ESAC Gaia team is heavily involved in DPAC especially in the overall architecture and the core processing.

The scheduler will assist the SOC Development Manager by maintaining the top level planning and scheduling information for SOC and mission critical software items.  This will require liaison with other DPAC players to gather information as well as regular contact with the ESAC team members.

For Gaia-related activities the Schedule Engineer will receive daily guidance from the Gaia Science Operations Development Manager.

Specific tasks include:

• Re-engineering and maintenance of the DPAC project schedules
• Liaison with the Satellite project, DPCs, CUs and Project Scientist team (PST) to establish milestones and other dependencies relevant to the project for inclusion in the project schedules
• Monitoring of the progress of work packages through liaison with the team members and utilisation of the Twiki XP tracking tool
• Analysis of schedules and resource deployment to assess feasibility and determine critical areas requiring special attention
• Supporting the project management by providing progress and activity reports
• Tracking inter CU deliveries with the System engineer.

Skills
We are looking for candidates with the following skills and abilities:
 A degree in Business Administration or Engineering
 Proven experience in working with project management and controlling tools e.g. Excel and Scheduling tools.

Specific knowledge is required in the following areas:

     Experience in maintaining schedules and work packages. Experience in resource balancing.
 Knowledge of development, Integration and testing of science processing systems and/ or developments to which geographically distributed teams contribute is an advantage.
  As DPAC produces all documentation using the LaTeX processing system, knowledge of LaTeX will be helpful.
     Able to operate in a team environment and willing to travel.
     Good interpersonal and communication skills are essential. 
     Comfortable in an international working environment
     Fluent in spoken and written English.
     Proven ability to work independently in a focused way against tight deadlines.

Please send your CV and letter of motivation before 23 May 2008 to btenberge@hespace.com stating the relevant reference number.