Kim received both her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. After graduate school, Kim started her career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has worked on several different projects at JPL including X2000, Mars Exploration Rover Mission and Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn.

Since December 2000, Kim has worked on the Cassini mission. Her first job on Cassini was as a Mission Planner, and then she moved to the Science Planning team where she was a sequence lead and joined the Titan Orbiter Science Team (TOST) doing Titan flyby integration. Currently she splits time between the TOST group as a Science Planner and the Spacecraft Office as a Systems Engineer.

As a Flight Systems Engineer, Kim is a member of the Cassini spacecraft office whose job is to ensure the health and safety of the spacecraft. She reviews sequence files before they are sent to the spacecraft to make sure they meet the science and engineering requirements and ensure that no flight rules are broken. Another part of her job involves development, implementation, and execution of maneuvers on the spacecraft. This means she creates commands that tell Cassini to fire her engines and then monitors the telemetry as it arrives at JPL to make sure everything went well. She also supports TOST by integrating science and engineering activities for Titan flybys.

Kim was the primary author on a 2010 SpaceOps paper titled “Cassini Titan Science Integration: Getting a 'Jumpstart' on the Process”