Senior Engagement Engineer

Sitreps•Los Angeles, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

A venture-backed AI software company whose platform designs spacecraft hardware. It generates antenna, power, and propulsion designs in days, work that normally takes engineering teams months. The models are the company's own, built over years of applied machine learning research rather than layered on top of a large language model. A natural-language interface now sits over the platform. Customers include a top-tier international aerospace manufacturer flying high-profile missions and a U.S. satellite constellation manufacturer led by veterans of a major commercial space program. The company also collaborates with a federally funded national research laboratory. Funding is seed-stage, raised largely from U.S. defense investors. The team is under 20 people: most are engineers and physicists based overseas, several holding doctorates, with a small business and strategy group in the U.S. Headquarters is in Los Angeles. It is a software company that happens to have started in spacecraft. Near-term programs are satellite hardware, and the intent is to take the same models into other domains.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship.
Active U.S. security clearance at the Secret level or above.
Military or defense background. Any branch, any service component.
Bachelor's degree in engineering, any discipline, or in a hard science such as physics.
Hands-on depth in applied machine learning, numerical optimization, or physics-based modeling and simulation. It does not have to have been in aerospace.
A track record of client-facing technical work: solutions, applications, forward-deployed or field engineering, mission management, or technical program management.
Based in or near Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.

Nice To Haves

Active Top Secret clearance.
Experience at a successful aerospace, space, or deep-tech startup, particularly as one of the first 50 people.
Working familiarity with spacecraft subsystems: propulsion, power, structures, or RF.
Master's or doctorate in engineering, physics, or a related field.

Responsibilities

Customer delivery.
Technical ownership of named accounts, from first evaluation through deployment of the platform inside their design workflows.
Scoping problems with customer engineering teams, running evaluations, demonstrating the platform, and diagnosing what went wrong when a design does not converge.
Scripting, analysis, benchmarking, and validation against the models, rather than routing every question to engineering.
Translating what customers actually need into something engineering can build against, and pushing back when a request does not generalize.
Representing the company in closed-door sessions and program reviews that require U.S. persons.
Proposals, technical responses, and benchmark studies: the technical half of the sales conversation.
Setting the pattern for the U.S. technical team, since you are the first hire into it, and taking on more of it as the company grows.