Intern in the Product Assurance and Safety Department

Our team and mission

The Product Assurance and Safety Department is responsible for the establishment and implementation of the ESA policy, requirements and standards with respect to quality. It is responsible for the provision of required expertise and support services to ESA projects, support Directorates and research activities in the Product Assurance and Safety disciplines, applied to all elements of space systems (ground and on-board), including hardware, software and humans. Product Assurance and Safety disciplines comprise Product Assurance management, technical risk management, dependability, safety, quality assurance, EEE components, parts materials and processes assurance, with support from the other TEC Departments engineering, expertise and laboratories. Furthermore, the Head of the Department is responsible for the supervision of the correct implementation of the Agency’s flight safety rules, planetary protection, nuclear safety and space debris safety (including re-entry safety) policies.

The Requirements and Standard Section provides the Executive Secretariat function for the European Cooperation for Space Standardisation (ECSS) and European Space Components Coordination (ESCC) and is responsible for proposing, monitoring and supporting the implementation of the ESA standardisation policy, both inside ESA and within the European space community.

The section is responsible for maintaining the catalogue of the ESA approved standards and ensures their prompt availability within ESA, as well as, monitoring and reviewing the tailoring and implementation of standards in ESA projects and proposing/ coordinating as necessary improvements to these standards. The section organizes and runs regular training courses on the ESCC and is the focal point for the organization and preparation of  the ESCCON conference held on a biennial basis. The section performs the co-ordination of the Agency's standardisation activities, including cooperation with external Standardisation Development Organizations (SDO).

Some section responsibilities are (not exhaustive list);

• providing the Executive secretariat for European Cooperation for Space Standardisation (ECSS) and managing the corresponding budget for TEC staff
• coordinating and supporting of the Working Groups, to define and ensure proper application of the ECSS doc. drafting rules
• providing guidance to projects on the tailoring of ECSS standards
• providing the ESA representative at the ECSS Technical Authority (TA).
• providing all executive secretariat functions to the ESA Standardization Boards, including coordination and support of ESA working groups
• providing Secretariat support for ECSS members and technical review of the ECSS Documents 
• custodian of the List of ESA Approved Standards (LEAS)
• promoting the ECSS system with a relevant training programme within ESA and to external Agencies and partners
• etc.

For further information visit our web site: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity for the internship

Topic: Software evaluation support for Requirements management digitalisation

The Requirements and Standards section is supporting ESA Agenda 2025 towards digitalisation and ECSS standards simplification. 

For that goal the ECSS platform used for requirements management (currently IBM DOORs with additional custom layers) in ESA projects Agencies and Industry will evolve in the next 2-3 years. The idea is a procurement or a custom development of a new ECSS Master Database (eg. data base architecture digitalising ECSS requirements management, ECSS processes workflow, tailoring features and remote working environment for the ECSS stakeholder and community). In that context, the section is looking for a software engineering/data base-oriented student to assist the ECSS core team and relevant standardisation engineers in the team to evaluate a few potential software available on the market (3 commercial tools pre-identified).

The type of tasks to be performed are:  

• within the ESA office environment; installing and assessing at least 3 COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) software pre-identified by the team, 
• importing a set of requirements/standards in each tool and evaluate / establish / run test cases with team support (digitalisation/tailoring)  
• assessing the advantages and disadvantaged of each software based on a series of ECSS metrics needed by the team (project & secretariat needs). 
• evaluating the user friendliness, pro and cons of each COTS software solution. 
• drafting a report with the results and some recommendations 

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward Thinking

Education

You must have student status and be enrolled at university for the entire duration of the internship. You should preferably be in your final or second to last year of a university course at master’s level in a technical or scientific discipline.

Additional requirements

The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another Member State language would be an asset.

Educational knowledge:

• Knowledge and background of the office software tools and relevant environment as Microsoft Office (especially Word, Excel, PowerPoint), TEAMS, MS-Sharepoint, Adobe Pro would be an asset. 
• Additionally, understanding of data bases software, architecture and concept (eg. as user, not developer) and commercial software package for project requirements management (as IBM DOORs, Jira, Confluence) would be an asset.