The challenge
The merger set the clock. Combining Lynk’s platform with Omnispace’s spectrum meant a mandate to accelerate deployment of the joined network, and that meant scaling engineering faster than a US-only team could. Lynk decided to build in India: a satellite engineering team in Chennai covering wireless, telecom, RF, and flight software.
The problem was that this talent barely exists in India. The entire qualified pool is around a thousand people, and they sit inside a short, knowable list of employers — the India centers of Lynk’s competitors, a handful of homegrown space startups, and the country’s public space and defense programs. AST SpaceMobile runs about seventy people in Hyderabad. Viasat runs a few hundred across Hyderabad, Chennai, and Delhi. Globalstar’s India presence is under fifty. A normal open req returns almost no one here, and the people worth hiring already have jobs they aren’t looking to leave.
So the work wasn’t screening a large pool down to the best. It was finding the few right people inside a fixed set and convincing them to move.
What we did
We mapped the pool instead of posting for it. We wrote down the finite set of places in India where this work actually happens and went through them by name: the India centers of AST, Viasat, and Globalstar; newspace companies building real hardware like Pixxel, Dhruva Space, Agnikul, and Skyroot; ISRO and the defense labs; and satcom and wireless firms like Mavenir and Keysight where RF and telecom depth lives. That list was the pool, and we worked it person by person.
We went after people who weren’t looking. In a pool this thin, the engineers worth hiring are employed and content, with median tenure over four years. They don’t answer job posts. So we headhunted: direct outreach, a discovery call to sell the mission first, and a short evaluation loop so a passive candidate didn’t have to sit through a month of rounds to decide.
We drew the line ourselves between satellite-ready and satellite-adjacent. Lynk’s product is telecom over satellite, so a wireless or RF engineer who has worked on 3GPP non-terrestrial network standards can do the work on day one, even without a literal satellite title. We defined that line precisely, backed by people who understood the engineering, which let us reach past the few hundred with a satellite title to the wider set whose experience genuinely transferred. That judgment is what made a thousand-person pool enough.
The result
Lynk got a satellite engineering team in Chennai that could do the work from day one, drawn from a national pool small enough to count.
The bar Mark set held: no train-up hires, no waiting for people to grow into the domain. The team could build, and Lynk kept moving at the pace the merger demanded.
