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EON is building a high-throughput point-to-point data transport network in space using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) to move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth. The company recently closed a $10.75M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, positioning itself as an alternative to subsea and terrestrial fiber infrastructure.
This role owns the mechanical design of EON's ground terminal, specifically the mechanisms and structures that point a telescope at a moving satellite and survive years in the field. You will design gimbals, coarse-steering mechanisms, and terminal structures from the demonstrator's first build through production-ready designs for every ground station.
Key responsibilities include: designing gimbal and coarse-steering mechanisms (bearings, drives, encoders, stiffness and backlash budgets); designing terminal structures (telescope support, enclosures, load paths for wind, thermal, and handling loads); owning structural analysis for stiffness, modal behavior, and survival loads with test correlation; defining mechanism requirements with PAT and GNC teams and carrying them into hardware; collaborating with the Thermal team on structural-thermal behavior affecting pointing and alignment stability; driving design-for-manufacturability and repeatable assembly; selecting and managing suppliers and machine shops from prototype through production; and supporting terminal integration and field deployment.
You will need a Bachelor's or advanced degree in mechanical engineering or related discipline, with depth in mechanism design (gimbals, rotation stages, actuators, bearings, drive trains), structural design and FEA analysis (ANSYS or equivalent), professional 3D CAD proficiency (NX, SolidWorks, Creo), hands-on prototyping and test experience, and comfort moving fast with incomplete data.
Preferred experience includes precision pointing mechanisms (telescope mounts, antenna gimbals, tracking pedestals), outdoor/field-deployed hardware design (sealing, corrosion, wind, seismic loads), motion-control adjacency (encoders, servo drives, mechanism tuning), design-for-manufacturability and assembly for low-rate production, optomechanical adjacency (kinematic mounts, athermalization), environmental testing, and materials selection for stiffness, weight, and thermal stability trades.
This is a seed-stage role with no program office or requirements team. Your hardware is the terminal pointing at space; you'll design it once for the demonstrator, then design it for production at every station. Compensation includes base salary (determined case-by-case), company stock options for all full-time employees, comprehensive medical/vision/dental insurance, paid parental leave, flexible PTO, relocation assistance to Los Angeles, and a real equipment and lab budget.
