Mechanical engineer jobs in California

About the role

Muon seeks a Staff Mechanical Engineer to serve as the mechanical design technical lead for one of our satellite classes. You'll 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'll 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. Due to the hands-on nature of this role, it requires onsite work at our San Jose location three days a week.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in space or other related industry
• Experience owning a spacecraft platform, product line, or major subsystem across multiple missions or products
• Proven track record of optimizing and maturing existing designs, not only clean-sheet development
• Deep competence in one or more of: structural mechanics and analysis, thermal management and modeling, environmental testing (TVAC, vibration)
• Mastery of drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets
• Customer-facing experience: technical interchanges, requirements discussions, or proposal contributions
• Demonstrated success mentoring and technically leading engineers and/or technicians
• Experience managing external vendors for part development and manufacturing
• Excellent communication, presentation, and cross-functional coordination skills
• B.S. or higher in Mechanical Engineering or related field
• Experience as a platform owner or product-line technical lead at a space company
• Direct contributions to winning proposals (technical volumes, orals, customer Q&A)

Benefits