Employee Spotlight: Meet Conor Brown – Director of Sales Engineering

What’s your role?

I’m the Director of Sales Engineering for our federal business unit. Not everyone is familiar with the ‘sales engineering’ role, but basically it’s my job to support our customers by developing technical solutions and providing support throughout the sales cycle. Oftentimes this involves a lot of interaction with customers or end users to identify mission requirements and capability gaps. From there, we work closely with the Spire sales and engineering teams to propose mission-driven solutions based on our variety of commercial data, analytics, and space-based services.

Describe your journey to Spire.

Even though I’ve only been an employee at Spire since 2020, I’ve been working with Spire in some capacity since 2014. Prior to joining the team I worked in the small satellite launch industry and got a front row seat to watch Spire grow from a startup in Silicon Valley to a global company with over 100 satellites in orbit. Since joining the team it’s been a whirlwind – constantly learning about new technology and discovering new applications and use cases.

What Spire value do you relate to the most?

Unbounded. This is the value I’ve tried to embrace the most since joining Spire. Fostering a culture of engineering creativity is something I’ve really been focused on as we strive to solve increasingly difficult and complex problems for our growing federal customer base.

What keeps you busy outside of work?

I love to spend time with my family (especially my french bulldog), hike, and play video games. I also recently picked up pickleball and golf. Oh and I’m a hockey fanatic – Let’s Go Caps!

What’s something unique about you that most people don’t know?

There was a while where I thought I may have had my hands on more satellites that went to space (well over 100) than just about anyone else in the world. It says a lot about how far this industry has come that I can say with confidence that’s not true any more. In fact, I’m sure there are several people at Spire that have me beat!

What interests you most about space? Have you always wanted to work in the space industry?

I’m most interested in the commercialization of space and discovering new applications and use cases that are enabled by proliferated low Earth orbit (LEO) smallsat constellations. I was always fascinated by space but never dreamed of having a career in this industry growing up. It’s easy to forget that it’s only been within the last decade that space has become commercially accessible.