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Muon Space seeks a Staff Mechanical Engineer to serve as technical owner for spacecraft mechanisms and components design. You will own single-point-failure management (margin, redundancy, test coverage), component qualification (deployment, life, and environmental testing), and mechanical architecture spanning multiple subsystems and concurrent missions on a six-month-to-year-plus horizon.
Key responsibilities include: owning the mechanical direction of spacecraft components from requirements through design, build, test, and launch-vehicle integration; creating and refining designs in SolidWorks while tailoring Muon's platform components and designing new ones as needed; performing first-order structural, dynamic, and thermal sizing to guide designs; making economically sound make-vs-buy decisions balancing rapid capability with constellation-scale production; leading mechanical portions of design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR); leading component/subsystem environmental test campaigns (vibration, TVAC, shock); producing and releasing engineering documentation (drawings, GD&T, BOMs, tolerance/mass budgets, build procedures) under configuration control; and contributing to Muon's mechanical engineering standards and culture.
You will engage directly with stakeholders and launch providers on interfaces, environments, margins, and acceptance criteria; define and champion mechanical design standards and best practices that scale across the organization; and act as a force multiplier by mentoring engineers at all levels and chairing design reviews. This role requires onsite work at the San Jose location three days per week due to the hands-on nature of the work.
Required: 10+ years designing, building, and testing high-reliability hardware; B.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field; proficiency in SolidWorks for medium-to-large assembly design; mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets; experience with ECO/DCO processes and PLM systems; demonstrated proficiency leading mechanical design for complex electromechanical systems; extensive documentation capabilities; experience managing external vendors; excellent communication and cross-functional coordination; strong mentorship skills; experience creating technical documents (ESOW, Technical Specification, DFMEA, Test Verification Plan); experience owning components used across platforms or major subsystems; and recognized depth in a specialty with industry references.
Nice-to-have: flight heritage on gimbaled devices, separation/launch interfaces, electrical modules, battery packs, reaction wheels, CMGs, magnetorquers, star trackers, propulsion, radiators, instrument packaging, or scan mechanisms; experience optimizing existing designs; familiarity with satellite payloads and mission-level mechanical integration; experience running structural analyses (FEMAP, ANSYS, NASTRAN) and environmental testing; thermal management systems expertise; large-assembly management in SolidWorks PDM or PLM systems like Duro; Python, MATLAB, or similar software skills; and experience qualifying mechanisms to NASA-STD-5017 or ECSS standards.
