Staff Spacecraft Mechanical Design Lead

ArcTern Ventures; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 202,000 - 223,000; Full time

Job summary

Muon Space in Silicon Valley is seeking a Staff Mechanical Engineer to serve as the mechanical design technical lead for our satellite-class platform. You will own the class architecture—bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload accommodation—and drive design choices from requirements definition through launch integration, typically over 10–15 months per mission.

This hands-on, IC role emphasizes technical leadership, potentially mentoring a small team, with onsite work in San Jose three days

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in space or related industry.
• Experience owning a spacecraft platform, product line, or major subsystem across multiple missions.
• Proven track record of optimizing and maturing existing designs beyond clean-sheet development.
• Deep competence in structural mechanics, thermal management, or environmental testing.
• Mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, mass budgets; CAD, PLM, and FEA tools.
• Customer-facing experience: requirements discussions or proposal contributions.
• Mentoring and technically leading engineers/technicians.
• Experience managing external vendors for part development and manufacturing.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional coordination skills.
• BS or higher in Mechanical Engineering or related field.

Responsibilities

• Own the mechanical architecture and design direction for a satellite class, balancing multiple missions.
• Lead mission mechanical design for specific missions: bus structure, thermal, solar, payload integration from requirements through launch.
• Lead design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and subsystems.
• Iterate and evolve the satellite class for performance, mass, cost, manufacturability, scaling to constellation quantities.
• Coordinate with customers on requirements, reviews, and proposals; partner with Business Development.
• Define and champion mechanical design standards, review processes, and best practices.
• Lead design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR) and environmental tests (vibration, TVAC, EMI).
• Coordinate multidisciplinary execution across structural, thermal, avionics, optical, RF, and program teams.
• Mentor engineers; hire, onboard, and sometimes manage a small team.

Skills

Flight hardware design

Platform ownership across missions

CAD/FEA tools

Customer-facing requirements

Mentoring engineers

Vendor management

Cross-functional communication

Education

Bachelor’s or higher in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

SolidWorks

PLM

FEA tools

Python/MATLAB

Job description

Muon Space in Silicon Valley is seeking a Staff Mechanical Engineer to serve as the mechanical design technical lead for our satellite-class platform. You will own the class architecture—bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload accommodation—and drive design choices from requirements definition through launch integration, typically over 10–15 months per mission.

This hands-on, IC role emphasizes technical leadership, potentially mentoring a small team, with onsite work in San Jose three days