Director, Mission Engineering & Space Programs

Vast; Long Beach (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 268,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Free meals

Job summary

Vast, based in Long Beach, CA, is seeking a Director, Mission Engineering & Management to own program and mission execution for a new constellation-ready spacecraft bus product line. Our first mission is a 10-satellite demo launch — the plan is to scale to hundreds of spacecraft per year.

You’ll own the program schedule, budgets, customer relationships, and launch campaign planning, ensuring executable commitments. We’re building a 15kW spacecraft bus with a focus on complex hardware delivery.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline.
• 8+ years of engineering experience in aerospace or defense.
• 3+ years of program management, mission engineering, or systems engineering leadership experience.
• Experience running satellite or complex hardware delivery programs — schedule, cost, customer management.
• Strong systems engineering background — you can own requirements, budgets, and interfaces, not just track them.
• Experience managing multi-unit builds (constellation, batch production, or similar).
• Managed customer and launch vehicle provider relationships.
• Comfortable with fast-paced, lean programs — you're the kind of person who runs the schedule in a spreadsheet before the formal tools are set up.
• Strong written and verbal communication — you'll represent the program to customers and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the integrated master schedule (IMS), critical path analysis, and milestone tracking.
• Own system-level requirements — capture in the digital twin toolchain, flow down to subsystem teams.
• Own system budget closure against mission and customer requirements — engineering maintains the bottoms-up budgets.
• Represent the customer and mission perspective within engineering — challenge system trades and design decisions against requirements.
• Manage customer interface — payload requirements, ICD negotiations, and schedule alignment across all manifest slots.
• Manage the satellite manifest — which sat gets which payload, build order, configuration tracking.
• Negotiate launch contracts and manage the launch vehicle provider relationship.
• Plan and coordinate the launch campaign — launch site logistics, range compliance, satellite shipping and stacking sequence.
• Plan facility readiness — engineering offices, avionics lab, manufacturing floor, clean room, TVAC, vibe, integration bay.
• Track risks, action items, and review close-out across all design reviews.
• Manage L-minus milestone tracking (L-180 through L-14).
• Coordinate spectrum licensing for confirmed and TBD customer payloads.
• Own status reporting — weekly cadence, management visibility.
• Partner with business development as the technical counterpart on proposals and new business — ensure what we sign up to is executable before we commit.
• Track vendor delivery schedules with the procurement lead.

Skills

Aerospace Engineering

Program Management

Systems Engineering

Customer Management

Budget Management

Education

Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering or related field

Job description

Vast, based in Long Beach, CA, is seeking a Director, Mission Engineering & Management to own program and mission execution for a new constellation-ready spacecraft bus product line. Our first mission is a 10-satellite demo launch — the plan is to scale to hundreds of spacecraft per year.

You’ll own the program schedule, budgets, customer relationships, and launch campaign planning, ensuring executable commitments. We’re building a 15kW spacecraft bus with a focus on complex hardware delivery.