Q: How did you get into Space Imaging?

I took a role within what was then the charge coupled devices (CCD) imaging department as a development engineer and that was, as it turned out, a very good move because that was in those days an emerging technology which we pushed forwards over the next few years through a variety of incarnations, eventually shaping it to be an organisation which made specialist imaging devices for things like high energy physics, ground based astronomy and space imaging. The space imaging part is what grew quite quickly from there. I was able to be part of the inception and growth of that activity. In those days, the use of CCD in space was relatively new and gave me the opportunity to engage with all sorts of interesting scientists and engineers across the world in how best to deploy these devices in their space instrumentation.

Q: Is this a UK only business?

No, it's truly global. I got the opportunity relatively early in my career to work with Space agencies around the world including NASA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese exploration agency and so on.

Q: How did your role evolve into Business Development?

I formed a team of applications engineers whose main role was to support our sales team and in particular to support our customers in the field. We would go out and talk to customers about how best to use our capabilities and how to turn those capabilities into products. We complemented the business development and sales team due to the fact that the technical nature of what we do is such that we have mainly engineers talking to engineers. We would sell our technology as engineers and we ended up doing most of the proposal writing and project scoping for the organisation as a team. It was great because it gives you that link between what we can do and the opportunity to inform customers what it is they could be doing. This also allowed us to share market knowledge with our product development teams. It was very interesting as it was both an outward and inward facing role.

Q: You then moved into a Chief Engineer role?

Yes, after 25 years of working in new business, I moved into a Chief Engineer role. The role involves communicating with our customer base mainly on a technical level and with our internal engineering teams to make sure that our customers understand what we can do for the and our engineers understand what our customers require. It's in many ways a technical translation game as the customer base doesn't speak the same technical language as an engineering base.

Q: How much work do you do with universities?

A lot of the academic expertise that goes into our work here is actually rooted in the world of universities. Many of the world's universities have departments which feed both the science need for space applications and crunch the numbers and get the PhDs and publish the papers with the data. So there's an interesting symbiosis between the space agencies as institutions and academic universities, as institutions. Outside of that, there is a large industry which supports all of that activity, of which we are a part.

Q: Teledyne e2v Space Imaging is seeing more demand from Commercial Space?

We grew up as an institutional supplier and we have now had to reshape to meet the demand from commercial space. There is a significant drive from commercial space where the money is private capital. The approach to the business is quite different, where now they're on a much shorter timescale, they're much less risk averse. They have a drive to get specific data for commercial end-use; typically it'll be things like high resolution EO for precision farming or disaster monitoring or military applications.

Commercial space customers want to buy a product and they want to know the product is going to do what they want.

Q: Where do you see the demand in the future for Teledyne e2v Space Imaging?

I think over the last five years we've seen quite a significant transformation, such that some of the aspirations we've had for a long time have now been realised. We are now selling more than just detectors, we are delivering the surrounding electronics and moving into all camera systems, instruments for space applications. We've moved much more into supplying infrared detectors for space. And that will go from strength to strength.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your job as Chief Engineer?

Well, it's finding out new information and solving new problems. And when I feel I'm adding my most value is talking to a new customer who has technical inquiries about how to solve their imaging problem. I can find out ways of both simplifying what they're trying to do or pointing out to them what they're trying to do can be made more straightforward. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect.

Q: What do you think the most important traits are of a Chief Engineer?

You definitely require a background in either physics, engineering or mathematics.

Also, you need to be quite creative. I think the creativity part is something which is sometimes overlooked.

Q: Is Teledyne e2v Space Imaging recruiting?

Yes - There is an unmet demand. With our existing orderbook, we need people now. More orders are coming in than our current capacity. We need a variety of people to ensure we can deliver including another Chief Engineer to join the team. ​