Founding Lead Systems Engineer

Equity: 0.3% – 1% depending on experience

About Us

We're a stealth team building space hardware at the edge of what's currently possible — high-stakes, flight-grade systems where the engineering bar is unforgiving and the upside is enormous. While we can't share full details yet, our founding and early engineering team includes talent from SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Impulse Space, the group includes people who've pulled off feats almost no one else on Earth has.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to own the technical baseline of our spacecraft from first principles — the requirements, architecture, interfaces, and margins that make every subsystem add up to a vehicle that works.

This is a senior technical leadership role. You will not only define and execute the vehicle and mission architecture, but also help build the systems engineering team, set technical standards, mentor engineers, and establish the systems, processes, and culture required to develop flight-grade spacecraft — rigorous enough to fly, lean enough for a startup.

This is not a narrow requirements-management role. You will own the full system: mission design and concept of operations, requirements flowdown and traceability, interface control, mass, power, propellant, and link budgets, fault management concepts, and the verification strategy that proves the vehicle is ready to fly. You will partner closely with every subsystem lead, with our launch provider, and with customers, and make the system-level trades across performance, schedule, cost, reliability, and mission risk that no single discipline can make alone.

The ideal candidate has direct experience with spacecraft systems engineering, mission design, verification and validation, and technical team leadership. We recognize that very few people have all of this. What matters most is that you have exceptional fundamentals, have led real systems from concept toward flight, have managed or mentored engineers in high-performance technical environments, and can operate independently in ambiguity while making sound engineering tradeoffs. You will have direct ownership over one of the company's core technical challenges.

Key Responsibilities

Own the vehicle and mission architecture, from concept definition through design, integration, test, qualification, and flight operations.

Define the mission and concept of operations with the founders and customers: mission phases, orbits and trajectories, operating modes, and interactions with the ground segment.

Own requirements: derive and flow them down from mission to vehicle, subsystem, and component levels, and maintain traceability through verification.

Own technical budgets and the margin policy: mass, power and energy, delta-v and propellant, pointing, link, data, thermal, and timing.

Define and control interfaces between subsystems and with the launch vehicle, ground segment, payloads, and customers through interface control documents.

Lead system-level trade studies — architecture, redundancy, orbit and mission design, build-vs-buy — with quantitative criteria and clear decisions.

Define vehicle operating modes, mode transitions, and the fault management concept with flight software, GNC, and mission operations.

Own the verification and validation strategy: the verification matrix, method selection (test, analysis, inspection, demonstration), and verification closure for flight readiness.

Lead reliability and mission assurance analyses: FMEA/FMECA, fault trees, hazard analysis, single-point-failure assessment, and reliability modeling.

Define the design environments — launch loads, thermal, radiation, and on-orbit — and allocate them to subsystems with structures, thermal, and avionics.

Lead the launch vehicle interface: payload user guide compliance, coupled loads analysis coordination, separation, mission integration documentation, and range safety deliverables.

Lead orbital debris mitigation, disposal planning, and conjunction assessment, and support spectrum, remote sensing, and launch licensing with regulators as the mission requires.