ESA Graduate Trainee in Product Assurance Management

Our team and mission

Project engineers are focused on making their space missions operate as planned. But such an optimistic approach is
insufficient in the face of Murphy's Law, the well-known maxim that was originally taken from rocketry: 'what can go wrong
will go wrong.'

To improve the likelihood of mission success, project teams are assisted by a separate class of personnel possessing a very different mind-set. ESA's Product Assurance and Safety (PA&S) engineers are responsible for failure-proofing missions by ensuring that the materials, mechanical parts, processes and electrical components used to assemble a spacecraft or launcher shall be fit for purpose over the entire life of a mission. They do this by providing engineering support for all ESA activities, verifying compliance to Product Assurance requirements. They represent an independent technical authority in the materials,mechanical parts, processes and electrical component domains.

They also seek to secure the availability of qualified materials, parts, processes and personnel to all ESA missions, futureproofing
them by guaranteeing short, medium and long-term access to critical technologies, monitoring industry trends
across all technical domains to help underpin Europe's competitiveness in the space sector.

PA&S engineers are also tasked with establishing and implementing requirements and standards for the development and
procurement of space-grade materials, components and related processes maintaining European standards for space. These
ensure consistency and agreement across the entire space sector in the quality of European products.

Space projects rely on embedded PA&S engineers to ensure hardware and software quality, product reliability, electronic
components, standards, materials, mechanical parts, critical industrial fabrication processes and configuration control.

Their aim is to develop and promote a technical understanding of the effects of the space environment on materials and
components. Their working tools are laboratories, test facilities, reviews, audits, inspection of processes and products. PA&S
engineers will alert managers if on potential quality problems and initiate corrective actions.

You are encouraged to visit the ESA website: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship

As an integral part of the section team, you will be working in transversal Product Assurance and Safety topics to support our activities.

A new mission classification has been defined by ESA to allow tailoring of the requirements according to the profile of the mission. After the definition of the new mission classification, the new ways of working start to be roll out and translated into our working tools and routines. The new mission classification imposes a big change of mindset in the PA&S domain. You will support the Section in this change by:

• Developing of reference material (templates, checklists, guidelines, etc) for the different class missions, engaging with the different Quality disciplines.
• Creating training material to ensure a common knowledge base within the Product Assurance and Safety community.
• Working to raise awareness of the changes introduced with the mission classification.
• Collecting Lessons Learned from projects in which this approach has been already introduced.

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation

Operational Efficiency

Fostering Cooperation

Relationship Management

Continuous Improvement

Forward Thinking

For more information, please refer to ESA Core Behavioural Competencies guidebook

Education

You should have recently completed or be in the final year of your master’s degree in Engineering or Science.

Additional requirements

You should have good interpersonal and communication skills and should be able to work in a multicultural environment, both independently and as part of a team. Previous experience of working in international teams can be considered an asset. Your motivation, overall professional perspective and career goals will also be explored during the later stages of the selection process.