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Salary: USD 202,000 - 223,000 / annual
Muon Space seeks a Staff Mechanical Engineer to serve as the mechanical design technical lead for one of their satellite classes. You will own and iterate on the class-level mechanical architecture—bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload accommodation—while also owning specific mission instances built on that class, from requirements definition through launch integration, typically over 10–15 months per mission.
You will start with Muon's platform building blocks and tailor them to mission needs, designing new mission-specific and platform components where required and making architecture decisions that balance performance, cost, and schedule. This is an individual contributor role with strong technical leadership responsibilities, including the potential for people management of a small team of mechanical engineers.
Key responsibilities include owning the mechanical architecture and design direction for a satellite class; serving as mission mechanical lead for specific missions; leading the design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and mechanical subsystems; iterating and evolving the satellite class to improve performance, mass, cost, and manufacturability; working directly with customers on requirements and technical reviews; defining and championing mechanical design standards and best practices; leading design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR) and environmental test campaigns; coordinating multidisciplinary execution across structural, thermal, avionics, optical, RF, and program teams; and mentoring mechanical engineers at all levels, including hiring and managing a small team as needed.
Required qualifications include 10+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in space or related industries; experience owning a spacecraft platform, product line, or major subsystem across multiple missions; proven track record of optimizing and maturing existing designs; deep competence in structural mechanics and analysis, thermal management and modeling, or environmental testing; mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets; proficiency with CAD (SolidWorks preferred), PLM, and FEA tools; customer-facing experience; demonstrated success mentoring and technically leading engineers; experience managing external vendors; excellent communication and cross-functional coordination skills; and a B.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering or related field.
Nice-to-have skills include experience as a platform owner or product-line technical lead at a space company, direct contributions to winning proposals, experience establishing engineering standards, experience with deployable structures, optomechanical instrument design, ADCS component experience, and software skills in Python or MATLAB.
The role requires onsite work at the San Jose location three days per week.
