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Salary: USD 150,056 - 171,360 / annual
Albedo is building the infrastructure to enable satellite missions in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), below 300 km, where proximity compounds performance and drag self-cleans debris. As a Senior Mechanical Engineer, you will design precision mechanical hardware across spacecraft product lines and payloads, including structures, assemblies, mechanisms, sensor and actuator mounts, optical benches, metering structures, flexures, and kinematic interfaces.
You will own the mechanical side of performance error budgets—allocating tolerances, running stack-ups, and proving allocations close. You'll be responsible for mechanical allocations affecting fabrication, alignment, and stability, contributing to system-level wavefront error (WFE) budgets and driving mechanical performance through cross-functional engineering tradeoffs.
Key responsibilities include designing for athermalization and dimensional stability through material selection and athermal mount schemes; owning parts through fabrication with detailed drawings, GD&T, vendor interaction, and manufacturability conversations; supporting optical alignment and integration hands-on in the lab with metrology; supporting environmental testing and root-cause analysis when hardware and analysis diverge; and partnering with optical design, systems, thermal, and AI&T teams to surface mechanical constraints early.
You should have owned a tolerance stack-up or mechanical error budget in a domain requiring demanding performance specifications. Experience with structural or thermal analysis, interferometric testing, optical metrology (phase-shifting interferometry, CGH alignment), and real-world GD&T drawing release with machinists and vendors is expected. Opto-mechanical depth is highly valued—you've worked on flight or fielded opto-mechanical hardware holding optical performance specs through environments and owned optical error-budget allocations to closure.
The ideal candidate has designed athermal mounts, reasoned about material selection for dimensional stability beyond CTE matching, and been in the lab for optical alignment and metrology on hardware they designed. If you come from semiconductor equipment, precision metrology, medical devices, scientific instrumentation, robotics, or motorsport rather than space or optics, you are the target candidate—the transferable skill is holding micron-scale geometry through thermal and dynamic environments.
Albedo operates with a first-principles approach, moving with speed, taking calculated risks, and learning quickly. The company uses AI regularly to create leverage across disciplines and works in-person at the Broomfield HQ to maximize team and company productivity. You'll be one of the first 100 employees with significant impact on Albedo's trajectory.
