Engineer (YC Track)
About The Position
Icarus is seeking individuals with a strong drive to build and ship real products, particularly those who have demonstrated this through participation in YC Startup School. This role is for builders who possess grit, horsepower, humility, technical curiosity, and a desire to excel. The position offers the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with real hardware, understand the process of bringing a physical product to flight, and contribute to a small, impactful team. The ultimate goal is to re-establish and maintain dominance in the Stratosphere by developing persistent, affordable, and scalable solar-powered aircraft that fly at 60,000 ft for extended periods.
Requirements
- Have built and shipped something real — a product with users, a company, a piece of hardware, an open-source project people depend on
- Recent grad, soon-to-graduate student, self-taught builder, or someone willing to take a break from school or a startup idea to join a small team doing something hard
- Evidence that you built it yourself, not that you managed someone who did
- High grit, high urgency, high ownership
- Strong software, embedded, electrical, mechanical, or systems instincts
- Willingness to learn anything required to get the aircraft flying
- Comfortable working hands-on in a factory, lab, desert, field environment, or wherever the mission requires
- Able to take feedback, improve quickly, and keep pushing
- No ego about doing dirty work
- Obsessed with building, testing, learning, and getting better
Nice To Haves
- Founded something, even if it failed. Especially if it failed and you can tell us exactly why
- Have a side project that got harder than you expected and you finished it anyway
- Have CAD, FEA, machining, avionics, embedded systems, GNC, power electronics, batteries, or test experience
- Have a story about something breaking at the worst possible moment and how you fixed it
Responsibilities
- Own a subsystem on a stratospheric aircraft from concept to flight
- Perform first-principles sizing, trade studies, and rapid iteration
- Build, test, break, and refine flight hardware and flight software
- Support integration, production, and flight operations
- Work closely with avionics, GNC, power, RF, structures, and software teams
Benefits
- Meaningful equity
- Top market salary and bonuses
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Factory in El Segundo
- Real ownership, real hardware, real flight
- Small team, massive responsibility
- High signal (engineering) to noise (management) culture
- Dream desk setup
- Daily lunch
- Unlimited celsius
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
