Staff Mechanical Engineer - Spacecraft Mechanical Design Technical Lead
$202,000–$223,000 year
HybridSan Jose, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the mechanical architecture and design direction for a satellite class, balancing concurrent mission needs from requirements definition through launch integration. Lead design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures and subsystems using first-principles engineering, while iterating on the platform to improve performance, mass, and manufacturability. Serve as mission mechanical lead, delivering bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload solutions and coordinating multidisciplinary execution across structural, thermal, avionics, and program teams. Define and champion mechanical design standards, review processes, and best practices across the organization. Lead design reviews and environmental test campaigns, mentor mechanical engineers, and manage a small team as needed. Work directly with customers on requirements and proposals to identify platform enhancement opportunities.
Required Qualifications
- 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 skills
- B.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering or related field
- Must be able to work onsite at our San Jose location three days a week
- Applicant must be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency
Desired Qualifications
- 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
- Experience running structural analyses (FEMAP, ANSYS); software skills in Python or MATLAB
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