Q&A: Rachel Chiu, Principal Systems Architecture Engineer

Why did you become interested in science and engineering?

It started when I was super young, about six, when I was first introduced to Lego and got the hands-on experience to build things (and from time to time, stepping on it and questioning my life decisions). But overall, it was inspiring, because I saw when things come together, they work. I was fortunate to travel with my parents to visit places like the Kennedy Space Centre and the Airbus A380 line at Toulouse. Seeing these huge structures in person, I was impressed, and eventually that steered me towards aerospace.

How did you get to where you are now?

I decided to specialise in aerospace, just because from a simple physics point of view, making metal fly in the air is impossible. That led me to go to Imperial College London to study aeronautical engineering. I started my career with Dyson, focusing on multi-physics simulation. I did everything from fluid dynamics, to electrical [and] thermal modelling, and much more. 

Soon I was bored by the challenge of a small system, so looked for a bigger system, and found my way into satellite communication systems. It spans from the ground to space, 1,200 kilometres above us. You don’t really have any systems bigger than that, in terms of physically covering a huge space, it’s challenging.

I joined Eutelsat [formerly OneWeb] as a systems modelling engineer. I needed to understand the entire system to model it: how our satellite constellation is moving around, how our network is operated, and how the links work between different parts of the network. Now I’m a systems architecture engineer, leading cross-functional projects and designing the upcoming features for our next satellite constellation and ground assets.

What has been your biggest achievement to date?

Driving forward our constellation deployment timeline, which is the main factor supporting the award citation. It’s quite rare because usually engineering dates are delayed. I’m pretty proud of that – how I managed to use a small one-off demonstration to drive a major system completion deadline ahead of schedule and recover from other delays.

One was the Black Swan event, when Russia invaded Ukraine and all of the launches through Russian territory were scrapped. The entire launch campaign was completely scrapped. If I didn’t make some adventurous last-minute changes, it would probably have cost us over a year to recover from that. I decided to propose some crazy ideas that sped up our completion by a year. It gave us more commercial flexibility while we let the geopolitical situation unfold and see what’s our next step, who’s our new launch partner, that kind of thing.

What is your favourite thing about being an engineer?

I think being an engineer in industry is more interesting because I get to both interact with other technical parties and see it from the customer’s (non-technical) point of view. It gives me an appreciation of why we shouldn’t over engineer things. From university education, we want to come up with the most brilliant engineering solution. But once I started working in the industry, I realised there’s more to it, it’s actually about getting to use the system correctly, getting customers engaged. 

I now enjoy that part of the challenge, which is less about developing very engineering-centric solutions, and really about making things work for everyone – not just for the few people with the technical understanding. I really enjoy seeing someone non-technical figuring out how to use the system because we make it simple and possible.

What does a typical day involve for you?

It depends on the project. Usually I’m juggling three to four things. I supervise some of the technical work from other junior members, giving them technical feedback and sense checking their work. Other times I’m discussing more strategic long-term projects with senior management and then I spend a bit of time documenting some of my knowledge or training other people with my system knowledge.

I do systems training for everyone. I write up some documentation and training material and generally do some of that knowledge transfer to other teams who might be designing something new. So even if I’m not directly supporting their project, I help everyone to work off our collective experience, so I usually spend my time juggling between these kind of tasks. At this point I spend very little time doing numerical or coding analysis by myself. I used to do that quite a lot, but right now it’s usually me supervising more.

What would be your advice to young people looking to pursue a career in engineering?

I would say you don’t really need permission to try, just try it and then eventually, that willingness to try will pay off. If you’re too scared to try, if you’re always waiting for permission to innovate, you will never get anywhere. I think the benefit of having young voices in the room is that we can bring in some good questions, make everyone rethink the status quo. Young people should always see their contribution as a refreshing voice in the room. Don’t be scared to ask questions. 
We’ve managed to push forward some unorthodox solutions that no one else considered from this. I just asked the simple question, why do we have to do it this way? 

So simple things like that. That’s why I managed to change our launch sequence and everything. I think it’s something younger engineers should try, just questioning the simple things and you never know, that might be what you need for a breakthrough.

What’s next for you?

I am currently moving towards more senior technical advisory roles so that I can contribute to more projects, rather than just focusing on one. That’s kind of what I enjoy, I can then have a better view across multiple projects. That’s another aspect I’m enjoying – instead of seeing people working in a silo, little pockets of excellence, I’m now trying to align everyone’s direction so that in the medium- to long-term there’s more technical synergy.