Reading a space engineering CV: what a document does not tell you

A CV records where an engineer was. It rarely records what they owned. In space engineering the gap between the two is wide enough to change a hiring decision.

The same programme line can describe an engineer who defined and defended a subsystem budget, and an engineer who supported the person who did. Both statements are truthful. Only one of them answers the question the hiring manager is actually asking.

Four questions that resolve most ambiguity

Structured screening does not need to be adversarial. It needs to be specific.

• Which decisions were yours to make, and which did you escalate?
• Which interfaces did you negotiate, and with whom?
• What failed, and what did the investigation conclude?
• Which parts of the verification campaign did you personally run?

Why this belongs in the search, not the interview

When these questions are asked at shortlist stage, the technical interview starts from a shared baseline instead of spending its first hour reconstructing responsibility. That is a direct saving for the engineering team, which is usually the scarcest resource in the process.