My name is Jeroen van der Velden and I work as a hardware design engineer at Celestia-STS, a role I took on in early 2016.  Before then, I worked with the company when it was known as Satellite Services BV, or simply SSBV, for six years, until it was acquired by the Celestia Group and changed its name to Celestia-STS in 2016.

When I started as a junior hardware engineer, I thought I would be doing schematic entry and routing/layout work, day in day out. I soon found out that being a hardware engineer involves far more than simply arranging components in schematic sheets. On any given day as a hardware engineer at Celestia, I can be doing everything from customer requirement analyses and circuit design right up to design validation and documentation, it’s so varied.

With what I know now, the role turned out to be far more than I imagined, if I’m honest. All these different tasks and interaction with firmware, software and mechanical engineers, to name just a few, make the job much more interesting and exciting. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I’ve had many great days here, but the best one was when we heard that SSBV was going to continue as Celestia-STS after being bought by the business.  SSBV had a great core team delivering good work with a smile. Now I find it fantastic that I can do many more interesting and challenging projects with this group of people.

With colleagues we love to talk about foreign food, Indian food in particular, habits and cultures. There are many people from lots of different parts of the world working at Celestia-STS and it is fascinating to see how all these different cultures blend in just fine and how everyone works well really together.

At Celestia-STS, everybody feels that details matter. When it comes to circuit design, you have to look beyond the obvious. For instance, a certain interface requirement might look easy to implement at first but can turn out to be surprisingly complex when all interfacing parties and their requirements are considered. The variety, and facing a new challenge every day, are just two of the things that make working here so rewarding.