Technical Sales Manager

Simera Sense is a leading provider of Earth observation camera solutions for the global small satellite market. Committed to excellence and innovation, we deliver superior products and services to our worldwide customer base.

Are you passionate about building customer relationships and driving business growth through technical solutions? We are seeking a results-driven Technical Sales Manager to identify new opportunities, develop strategic customer partnerships, and deliver tailored solutions that create value for both our customers and our business.

Position Type: Fulltime

Remote Opportunity: No

Report To: Chief Commercial Officer

Location: Leuven, Belgium

Job Purpose:

To serve as the technical link between Simera Sense's commercial and engineering functions, ensuring that customer commitments are technically sound, clearly communicated and achievable, by supporting technical client engagements, aligning payload solutions with mission requirements, contributing to proposal development, and translating client feedback into insights that inform sales and marketing strategy.

Responsibilities

• Revenue Growth and Opportunity Development

• Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, including ground support equipment, image processing, calibration, flatsat/EFM models and SSA applications.

• Assess the technical fit, risk and complexity of each opportunity, and provide a technical view for MQL/SQL qualification, go/no-go and bid/no-bid decisions.

• Support clarification rounds, best-and-final offers and contract negotiations on technical scope, deliverables and acceptance criteria.

• Commercial Risk and Cost Control

• Validate feasibility, schedule and cost inputs from Engineering and Production before they are committed to customers.

• Check proposals for requirement compliance, internal consistency, correct pricing inputs, terms and conditions, and export-control considerations before submission.

• Escalate technical risks, customisation requests and scope gaps early to the CCO, BD Manager and relevant engineering leads.

• Pre-Sales Technical Support

• Own technical support for prospects from first contact through to proposal and negotiation, working with the assigned Sales Manager or Business Developer.

• Respond to technical enquiries, RFIs, RFPs and clarification requests within agreed response times.

• Lead or co-lead technical presentations, deep-dive sessions, product demonstrations and technical due-diligence reviews with customer engineers and system architects.

• Mission Fit and Solution Advice

• Lead structured requirement-qualification discussions on mission objectives, orbit, platform class, GSD/GRD, swath, spectral bands, accuracy, revisit, data volume, downlink, SWaP-C, schedule and budget.

• Map customer requirements to the Simera Sense portfolio, define the recommended configuration, and prepare compliance matrices and mission-fit analyses with clear assumptions.

• Advise customers on payload integration and help them interpret datasheets, ICDs, performance data, the calibration approach and data products.

• Customer Confidence and Trust

• Present Simera Sense's flight heritage, qualification and test evidence, quality management approach and delivery track record clearly, credibly and honestly.

• Give transparent technical advice, including limitations and trade-offs, and work with customer technical teams to resolve concerns, reduce perceived mission risk and support internal approvals.

• Represent Simera Sense technically at trade shows, conferences, customer visits and partner events.

• Mission constraints

• Support spacecraft-payload interface evaluations.

• Define proposed system architectures and payload configurations.

• Recommend value-added services and support packages.

• Sales–Engineering Interface

• Act as the single technical point of contact between Sales/BD and the engineering, development and production teams on all customer-related technical matters.

• Translate customer needs into clear technical briefs for Engineering, and translate engineering capability, constraints and lead times into commercially useful language for Sales and BD.

• Attend engineering, product and production planning meetings to stay current on product status, roadmap, test results, manufacturing capacity and delivery schedules.

• Proposal Development

• Support Sales and BD in compiling technical and commercial proposals, and write and edit the technical volumes.

• Coordinate inputs from Engineering, Production, Quality, Finance and Legal, and manage internal deadlines and review cycles (e.g. pink/red team reviews).

• Maintain a proposal library of templates, boilerplate text, standard compliance statements, datasheet extracts and past-performance references.

• Handover and Configuration Control

• Own the Product Configuration Document (PCD) during pre-sales and hand it over to the Contract Managers.

• Ensure customer commitments (specifications, deliverables and acceptance criteria) are handed over accurately to the project and production teams after contract award.

• Identify requests that need customisation, a new variant or a partner solution, and involve Product Management and Engineering to assess viability.

• Customer and Market Insight

• Log all technical customer interactions, requirements, objections, competitor mentions and feedback in the CRM accurately and promptly.

• Analyse CRM and engagement data to identify trends and produce monthly or quarterly insight reports with clear recommendations for the CCO, Sales, BD, Marketing and Product Management.

• Track competitor products and market developments in the EO payload, imager electronics and SSA markets, and update the competitive battlecards.

• Strategy and Product Improvement

• Use customer insights to refine target segments, value propositions, messaging, pipeline priorities and sales plays, in collaboration with Sales, BD and Marketing.

• Provide structured customer requirements to Product Management to inform the roadmap, variants and new-product decisions.

• Conduct win/loss debriefs to improve future proposals.

• Technical Knowledge and Thought Leadership

• Build and maintain a library of technical proof points, including case studies, use cases, in-orbit performance data, sample imagery and customer references.

• Contribute to technical webinars, white papers, blogs and conference papers in collaboration with Marketing.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in aerospace, Electrical/Electronic, Mechanical or Systems Engineering, Optics/Photonics, Physics or Remote Sensing, or an equivalent technical qualification

Minimum years of work experience:

• 3 or more years of experience in technical sales, sales engineering, pre-sales, systems engineering or proposal management, ideally in the space, satellite, aerospace or defence sector.

Required Experience:

• Demonstrated experience writing or compiling technical proposals and responding to RFI/RFQ/RFP documents.
• Working knowledge of EO payloads, optical systems, satellite integration, remote sensing and image-quality concepts (GSD, MTF, SNR, radiometric/geometric accuracy, NIIRS).
• Experience working with customers such as satellite manufacturers, integrators, agencies, defence/government end users and EO data providers.
• Experience with CRM systems and data analysis for sales and market insight.
• Fluent in English required; Dutch, French or Afrikaans is an advantage.
• Microsoft 365, CRM, and document/PLM or project tools; familiarity with proposal-management practices is an advantage

Recommendations:

• Master’s degree in aerospace, Electrical/Electronic, Mechanical or Systems Engineering, Optics/Photonics, Physics or Remote Sensing.

• Proficiency in Dutch, French or Afrikaans is an advantage.

• Special Requirements

• Hybrid office-based role with regular collaboration across European and South African time zones.

• International travel is expected for customer visits, technical meetings, trade shows and conferences.

• Occasional evening or weekend work may be required to meet proposal deadlines.

What we offer

• The opportunity to work in the fast-growing space industry.
• Niche global market for optical payloads for microsatellites.
• Cutting-edge technology at your fingertips
• A competitive salary
• A friendly working environment.

Ready to make an impact?

• Apply now by submitting your CV and cover letter