Technical Lead- Spacecraft Mechanical Design
$190,000 per year
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Posted 2 days ago
SENIORITY
Manager
SALARY
$190,000 per year
About the role
- Own the mechanical architecture and design direction for a satellite class, balancing the needs of multiple concurrent and future missions
- Serve as mission mechanical lead for specific missions using your satellite class, delivering bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload mechanical solutions from requirements definition through launch vehicle integration
- Lead the design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and mechanical subsystems, applying first-principles engineering to problems beyond established approaches
- Iterate and evolve the satellite class — improving performance, mass, cost, and manufacturability — and ensure designs scale from prototype builds to constellation quantities
- Work directly with customers on requirements, technical reviews, and proposal content; partner with Business Development to identify platform enhancement opportunities
- Define and champion mechanical design standards, review processes, and best practices across the organization
- Lead design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR) and environmental test campaigns (vibration, TVAC, EMI)
- Coordinate multidisciplinary execution across structural, thermal, avionics, optical, RF, and program teams
- Mentor mechanical engineers at all levels; hire, onboard, and manage a small team as needed
- 10+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in space or other related industry
- Experience owning a spacecraft platform, product line, or major subsystem across multiple missions or products
- Proven track record of optimizing and maturing existing designs, not only clean-sheet development
- Deep competence in one or more of: structural mechanics and analysis, thermal management and modeling, environmental testing (TVAC, vibration)
- Mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets; proficiency with CAD (SolidWorks preferred), PLM, and FEA tools
- Customer-facing experience: technical interchanges, requirements discussions, or proposal contributions
- Demonstrated success mentoring and technically leading engineers and/or technicians
- Experience managing external vendors for part development and manufacturing
- Excellent communication, presentation, and cross-functional coordination skillsB.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering or related field
- Nice-to-Have Skills
- Experience as a platform owner or product-line technical lead at a space company
- Direct contributions to winning proposals (technical volumes, orals, customer Q&A)
- Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices at an organizational level
- Experience with deployable structures (solar arrays, antennas, mechanisms)
- Optomechanical instrument or payload design experience
- Experience with ADCS components: reaction wheels, torque rods, star trackers
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.
