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Senior Mechanical Engineer - Spacecraft Mission Mechanical Lead

San Jose, CA

About the role

Muon seeks a Senior Mechanical Engineer to serve as a Mission Mechanical Engineering Lead. In this role, you'll leverage your experience to advance and optimize our new and existing spacecraft designs while leading R&D efforts for next-generation mechanical systems.

You'll own the mechanical engineering direction for one or more spacecraft missions—translating customer and mission requirements into elegant, manufacturable designs. This includes driving design maturity and making critical architecture decisions that balance performance, cost, and schedule.

The ideal candidate brings proven space hardware experience and a systems mindset, going deep on design and analysis while collaborating across disciplines. You'll elevate the team output through technical guidance, rigorous design reviews, and establishing standards. You'll engage with structural analysis, dynamics, thermal design, supplier management, and everything else associated with the full lifecycle of an electromechanical product.

This is a Senior-level individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibilities and potential management of a small team of mechanical engineers and technicians.

Due to the hands-on nature of this role, it requires onsite work at our Mountain View and San Jose locations.

Responsibilities

Mission Mechanical Engineering Leadership

  • Serve as Mission Mechanical Engineering Lead, owning the mechanical design direction and delivery for spacecraft programs
  • Translate mission requirements into mechanical architectures, coordinating across thermal, structural, avionics, optical, RF, and systems engineering disciplines
  • Create project-level roadmaps aligned with departmental objectives; present plans for manager feedback and advocacy
  • Make economically sound make vs. buy decisions, balancing rapid capability demonstration with constellation scale-up requirements

Team Leadership & Mentorship

  • Manage directly or indirectly 3–6 mechanical engineers and technicians, including task assignment, technical guidance, and career development
  • Mentor team members on systems-level thinking and complex problem-solving; serve as a recognized subject matter expert and trusted authority
  • Lead rigorous design reviews, providing constructive feedback that elevates the quality of engineering work
  • Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and training of mechanical engineering talent

Design Optimization & R&D

  • Apply space industry experience to optimize and mature existing spacecraft designs for improved performance, reliability, and manufacturability
  • Lead R&D efforts for satellite mechanical systems, identifying opportunities for innovation and risk reduction
  • Research and document design trade decisions on manufacturability, cost, and schedule; drive consensus with cross-functional stakeholders
  • Contribute to maturing Muon's mechanical engineering standards, best practices, and design guidelines

Hands-On Design & Analysis

  • Create, analyze, and refine spacecraft mechanical designs in SolidWorks, managing large assemblies
  • Develop clean-sheet and derivative mechanical/structural architectures through detailed design
  • Perform stress and dynamic analyses (hand calculations, simple FEM) to support structural designs including joint design and stiffness analyses
  • Collaborate with structural and thermal analysts to iterate designs for performance and manufacturability

Test & Verification

  • Design test plans and lead environmental test campaigns including vibration, TVAC, and EMI
  • Design test fixtures and specify equipment (accelerometers, strain gauges, thermocouples, etc.)
  • Influence flight designs to ensure hardware is optimized for both build efficiency and test effectiveness

Qualifications 

  • 8+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in the space industry (or similar: aerospace, autonomous vehicles, etc.)
  • Demonstrated proficiency leading mechanical design for spacecraft or complex electromechanical systems
  • Experience managing or technically leading a small team of engineers and/or technicians
  • Strong competence in one or more of: structural mechanics/analysis, thermal management/modeling, environmental testing (TVAC, vibration)
  • Proficiency in CAD (SolidWorks preferred) for medium-to-large assembly design and management
  • Mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets
  • Experience with ECO/DCO processes and PLM systems
  • Extensive documentation capabilities: build procedures, test plans, design trades, DOEs
  • Experience managing external vendors for part prototyping and development
  • Excellent communication, presentation, and cross-functional coordination skills
  • B.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering
  • A desire to change the way the world understands and reacts to climate and environmental data

Nice-to-have Skills

  • Flight heritage—hardware you designed that has successfully operated in space
  • Experience optimizing and maturing existing designs (not only clean-sheet development)
  • Familiarity with satellite payloads and mission-level mechanical integration
  • Experience with deployable hardware (solar arrays, antennas, mechanisms)
  • Experience with ADCS components: reaction wheels, torque rods, star trackers
  • Optomechanical instrument or payload design
  • Experience running structural analyses (FEMAP, ANSYS)
  • Experience with thermal management systems for spacecraft
  • Large assembly management in SolidWorks PDM, Duro, or similar PLM
  • Software skills in Python, MATLAB, or similar
  • Project management experience: customer reviews, Gantt charts, risk tracking
  • Experience qualifying external vendors and contract manufacturers
  • Google Workspace proficiency; Slack

Salary

The salary range for this role is  $181,000 - $202,000 plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits package. Final compensation will be based on skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location as assessed during the interview process.

About Muon Space

Founded in 2021, Muon Space is an end-to-end Space Systems Provider that designs, builds, and operates LEO satellite constellations delivering mission-critical data. Our revolutionary, integrated technology stack enables customers to optimize every dimension of their missions for faster time-to-orbit and superior constellation remote sensing performance. Our state-of-the-art facility in the heart of Silicon Valley is optimized for manufacturing spacecraft and rapid, flexible payload integration at scale. From climate monitoring to national security, Muon Space is dedicated to delivering Earth Intelligence for a safer and more resilient world.

Taking Care of Our Team

At Muon salary is only part of our total compensation package. In addition to salary, full-time employees receive equity compensation as well as benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401k retirement plan, short & long term disability and life insurance. We also offer three weeks paid vacation for new employees, along with 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time and paid parental leave.

Our mission embraces the entire planet and we believe our team should too.  Muon is dedicated to creating a diverse and dynamic company and workforce. We believe in equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, age, national origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or gender identity. We value diversity in the workplace, and that starts with our applicants. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check all the boxes, and we look forward to reviewing your application! In addition, if you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

ITAR/EAR Requirements

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either 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. The Company may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.

 

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