Senior Reentry Trajectory Design Engineer

Varda; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 215,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with 6% employer match

Relocation support

Paid time off

Cell phone allowance

Stock options

Wellness reimbursement

Parental leave

Job summary

Varda is hiring a Senior Mission Design Engineer to lead full-cycle mission planning and orbital mechanics for the world’s first commercial reentry vehicle. You will design trajectories, develop modeling infrastructure, and collaborate across propulsion, software, and flight operations teams to ensure safe, reliable reentry profiles.

You will own end-to-end mission planning, from requirements to on-orbit and reentry operations, and mentor a multidisciplinary team in a fast-paced startup

Qualifications

• B.S. degree in aerospace, mechanical, electrical engineering, physics, or related field.
• 5+ proven years of experience, or PhD with 3+ years of relevant experience.
• Demonstrated knowledge in designing, modeling, testing, and flying orbital trajectories or aerospace guidance, navigation, and control systems.
• Highly adept software and model development skills, particularly in C++/Python/Matlab
• Understanding of orbital mechanics, modeling and simulation, and software development.
• Experience anchoring/fitting first principles models to test data or high‑fidelity external simulations.
• Proven system engineering and configuration management skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Perform trajectory design, optimization, and dispersion analysis for reentry of a next generation space vehicle.
• Design spacecraft trajectories and produce orbital analyses for commercial reentry vehicles.
• Optimize trajectories based on fuel, time, and performance characteristics.
• Collaborate with propulsion, software and flight operations teams to meet objectives.
• Develop autonomous navigational solutions, collision avoidance, orbital rendezvous, and atmospheric re-entry algorithms.
• Run Monte Carlo analysis to characterize feature performance.
• Lead development of new vehicle capabilities.
• Maintain ground-based mission operations tooling for scalable on-orbit operations.

Skills

Teamwork

Project scoping

6 DoF simulation (C++)

Trajectory design

Mission analysis

Education

B.S. in aerospace/ mechanical/ electrical engineering or physics

PhD with 3+ years experience (optional)

Tools

C++

Python

Matlab

Job description

Varda is hiring a Senior Mission Design Engineer to lead full-cycle mission planning and orbital mechanics for the world’s first commercial reentry vehicle. You will design trajectories, develop modeling infrastructure, and collaborate across propulsion, software, and flight operations teams to ensure safe, reliable reentry profiles.

You will own end-to-end mission planning, from requirements to on-orbit and reentry operations, and mentor a multidisciplinary team in a fast-paced startup