Staff Mechanical Engineer - Spacecraft Mechanical Design Technical Lead

Muon Space•San Jose, CA

2d•$202,000 - $223,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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; proficiency with CAD (SolidWorks preferred), PLM, and FEA tools
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

Nice To Haves

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)
Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices at an organizational level
Experience with deployable structures (solar arrays, antennas, mechanisms)
Optomechanical instrument or payload design experience
Experience with ADCS components: reaction wheels, torque rods, star trackers
Experience running structural analyses (FEMAP, ANSYS); software skills in Python or MATLAB

Responsibilities

Own the mechanical architecture and design direction for a satellite class, balancing the needs of multiple concurrent and future missions
Serve as mission mechanical lead for specific missions using your satellite class, delivering bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload mechanical solutions from requirements definition through launch vehicle integration
Lead the design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and mechanical subsystems, applying first-principles engineering to problems beyond established approaches
Iterate and evolve the satellite class — improving performance, mass, cost, and manufacturability — and ensure designs scale from prototype builds to constellation quantities
Work directly with customers on requirements, technical reviews, and proposal content; partner with Business Development to identify platform enhancement opportunities
Define and champion mechanical design standards, review processes, and best practices across the organization
Lead design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR) and environmental test campaigns (vibration, TVAC, EMI)
Coordinate multidisciplinary execution across structural, thermal, avionics, optical, RF, and program teams
Mentor mechanical engineers at all levels; hire, onboard, and manage a small team as needed