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Salary: USD 250,000 - 275,000 / annual
Albedo is building the infrastructure for Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellites, operating between 250–400 km altitude where proximity enhances performance and natural drag mitigates debris. As Director of Hardware Engineering, you will lead the hardware engineering organization across opto-mechanical, structures, thermal, and avionics disciplines—managing approximately three to four teams of managers and individual contributors.
Your core responsibilities include owning design margin discipline across thermal, structural, radiation, electrical, mass, and optical budgets, ensuring margins are routine rather than heroic. You will drive the assembly, integration, and test (AIT) build flow from primary mirror fabrication through bus-to-payload integration and environmental testing, eliminating integration-stage discoveries that should have been caught analytically. You will set and defend the make-versus-buy strategy, pursuing vertical integration where physics is the competitive moat while aggressively outsourcing commodity components—with decisions documented and revisited.
You will develop hardware engineering managers capable of running their domains independently, partner closely with the Director of Software, Systems Engineering, and program management to close the loop between hardware design and flight telemetry, and engage directly in design reviews, anomaly investigations, and supplier technical assessments without becoming a bottleneck.
Ideal candidates bring 12+ years in precision spaceflight hardware with at least four years leading hardware engineering managers. You should have hands-on depth in opto-mechanical engineering, structural dynamics, or precision pointing systems—having personally owned a precision payload or pointing chain end-to-end. You must demonstrate a track record of design margin discipline against NASA, MIL, or equivalent standards, with examples where your margin calls held up under flight conditions. Cross-disciplinary system reasoning is essential: you think in budgets across optics, structures, thermal, GNC, mass, and power, and can trace budget violations to root cause. Experience leading hardware through environmental test campaigns and on-orbit anomaly resolution is required, along with real make-versus-buy decisions you can defend with cost, schedule, and capability data. You are comfortable holding a schedule against pressure when analysis demands it, and yielding when analysis says you can.
