Product Manager - Ground Segment

Hermeus is a venture-backed defense aviation company reclaiming the lost art of rapid iterative prototyping to build the fastest aircraft in the world today. By prioritizing relentless hardware iteration, we deliver high-speed systems at the pace of the modern battlefield. We work with the Department of War to provide the high-speed capabilities our nation and its allies need to maintain a durable, asymmetric advantage.

The Product Manager - Ground Segment is responsible for defining, prioritizing, and shaping ground segment capabilities across Hermeus aircraft programs. This role covers mission planning, command and control, telemetry, mission data handling, cross-domain workflows, and mission debrief and analysis, ensuring ground systems effectively support simulation, test, and flight operations. 

This position owns the ground segment from a product and outcome perspective, ensuring operator-facing tools, mission data workflows, and integration touchpoints with airborne systems and autonomy services are aligned to operational needs, program milestones, and customer expectations. 

The role partners closely with Engineering, Test, Flight Operations, and other Product Managers to ensure ground segment capabilities are coherent, testable, and demonstrable across simulation, HITL, and live flight environments. 

• Ground segment product definition and strategy: Define ground segment product capabilities spanning mission planning, command and control, telemetry ingestion, operator interfaces, data logging, playback, and debrief; translate operational needs, flight-test objectives, and customer requirements into prioritized capability increments with clear acceptance criteria; and maintain the ground segment product roadmap aligned with program milestones and flight events.
• Operator experience and workflow definition: Define operator-facing workflows for mission planning, execution, monitoring, contingency management, and debrief, ensuring ground segment capabilities support intuitive, deterministic, and auditable interactions while clearly representing operator actions, autonomy commands, and vehicle state to users.
• Integration intent and interfaces of interest: Define integration intent and interface expectations between ground systems, airborne systems, autonomy services, simulation environments, and debrief tools, ensuring capability definitions account for OMS, UCI, ICDs, APIs, schemas, message contracts, versioning expectations, and integration risks while driving cross-team alignment.
• Mission data lifecycle and evidence support: Define product expectations for the mission data lifecycle from onboard logging through ground ingestion, synchronization, storage, playback, and analysis, establishing requirements for time alignment, metadata tagging, event annotation, and evidence capture to support verification, validation, regression testing, and post-flight analysis.
• Simulation, HITL, and flight enablement: Define how ground segment capabilities are exercised across SITL, HITL, Joint Simulation Environment (JSE), and live flight environments, ensuring consistency of workflows, telemetry expectations, and mission phase transitions while partnering with test teams to enable deterministic testing and rapid issue isolation.
• Cross-domain and secure data workflows: Define product requirements for cross-domain mission data packaging, sanitization, transfer, and storage, establishing expectations for metadata, integrity checks, and evidence handling while ensuring ground segment capabilities account for security, export-control, and data-handling constraints.
• Readiness, verification, and delivery support: Define ground segment acceptance criteria and readiness expectations for flight events and demonstrations, support readiness discussions and milestone reviews by representing scope, maturity, and limitations, and ensure deliverables are traceable, review-ready, and aligned with program and customer needs.
• Customer and stakeholder engagement: Support government and partner engagements related to ground segment capabilities, operator workflows, and mission data products, and help shape deliverables, demonstrations, and transition artifacts for external stakeholders.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. 
• 10+ years of experience delivering mission systems, ground control software, operator interfaces, telemetry systems, or distributed data platforms. 
• Demonstrated experience defining and delivering complex, operator-facing system capabilities. 
• Strong familiarity with OMS, UCI, ICD-driven development, and service-based mission architectures. 
• Understanding of mission data pipelines, time synchronization, logging, playback, and analysis workflows. 
• Experience working with Cameo Systems Modeler, SysML, and building MBSE models 
• Experience working across simulation, HITL, and flight-test environments. 
• Strong cross-functional communication skills with engineers, operators, and program leadership. 
• Active Secret clearance required; TS/SCI preferred.

• Experience supporting unmanned or high-speed aircraft ground operations. 
• Familiarity with cross-domain data workflows, sanitization processes, and classified mission environments. 
• Experience integrating or coordinating third-party mission software or analytics tools. 
• Background supporting DoD flight test, demonstrations, or transition programs. 

U.S. EXPORT CONTROL COMPLIANCE STATUS 

The person hired will have access to information and items subject to U.S. export controls, and therefore, must either be a “U.S. person” as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.62 or otherwise eligible for deemed export licensing. US persons include U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), and asylees and refugees with such status granted, not pending. 

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Hermeus is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions at Hermeus are based solely on merit, competence, and qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status.