Systems Engineer, Spacecraft Design & Simulation
$112,340–$159,468 year
On-site · Long Beach, California, United States
Job Summary
Systems Engineer, Spacecraft Design & Simulation to own the spacecraft design, simulation, and digital twin toolchain that underpins Vast’s mission factory. You will define governing equations and boundary conditions for models, build and maintain a rigorous validation suite, and drive design trades across power, thermal, ADCS, and orbital mechanics to ensure customer requirements are met. The role focuses on model-based systems engineering as the primary engineering record, enabling rapid iteration and scalable growth from initial demos to hundreds of spacecraft per year, with responsibilities spanning toolchain evolution, validation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline
- 4+ years of spacecraft systems engineering or mission analysis experience
- Spacecraft systems engineer with broad subsystem knowledge — you understand power, thermal, ADCS, and orbital mechanics well enough to catch errors in a simulation
- Strong analytical skills — you can set up a hand calculation for a thermal equilibrium problem, a power budget across an orbit, or a pointing error budget
- Rigorous validation mindset — you're the person who asks “how do we know this is right?” and builds the test to prove it
- Comfortable with AI-assisted development workflows
- Generalist background — prior experience at a small-sat company, research lab, or mission design role where you touched multiple subsystems
- Cross-functional collaboration skills — you'll work with every discipline lead to capture their domain knowledge and translate it into validated models
- Comfortable reading and reviewing code — you don't need a software engineering background, but you should be able to understand what code is doing and catch errors
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