“Find your place in space”: Revitalising SpaceCareers.uk to boost professional development in the space industry

SpaceCareers.uk, a UK non-profit that connects industry professionals with emerging talent, needed a major upgrade of its web application to fix performance problems and add new features. An outdated codebase pushed page load times up to a minute, which hurt user engagement and the organisation's mission to support career growth and recruitment. Setting up employer accounts and job postings was largely manual, which limited growth, so SpaceCareers.uk wanted to redesign its workflows as well as automate them. It also wanted better support for newcomers to the space sector, to make the industry more accessible and inclusive for the next generation of space professionals. SpaceCareers.uk chose us to rebuild the platform without interrupting its operations.

The work called for technical skill and an understanding of how a non-profit operates. Our team comprised a project manager, a senior Python developer, senior and medior frontend developers, and a lead developer in a consulting role. We used Python for the backend and React with JavaScript/TypeScript for the frontend.

We started with performance. A full review and refactor of the codebase brought loading times down sharply. We then built a self-checkout system that automates the creation of employer accounts and job postings, freeing the SpaceCareers.uk team to concentrate on strategic work.

We also added educational content. The 'UK Space 101' page introduces the UK space industry, and the new 'Advertise' page lets employers publish job listings themselves. To support these changes, we set up CI/CD pipelines and a cloud environment on AWS, giving the platform reliable, scalable infrastructure for its current and future needs.

Page load times dropped from up to a minute to under half a second, improving user satisfaction and platform reliability. The self-service system took operational tasks off the SpaceCareers.uk team so it can focus on strategic development. The platform now attracts more employers and gives job seekers more comprehensive information, and the team can keep refining it to support talent across the UK space sector.