Staff Mechanical Engineer - Complex Mission Mechanical Lead

About the role

Muon seeks a Staff Mechanical Engineer to own delivery of bus structure, thermal, solar, and payload design/integration solutions for complex spacecraft missions (such as those with high agility or high power requirements) with the support from domain experts. Ownership will start at the requirements definition phase and continue through launch integration over the course of 10-15 months per mission. 

In this role, you will be expected to start with platform building blocks and tailor them to meet requirements, as well as identifying and designing required new mission specific components or new platform components.  You will be responsible for making critical architecture decisions that balance performance, cost, and schedule.

The ideal candidate brings proven space hardware experience and a systems mindset- going deep on design and analysis while collaborating across disciplines to deliver high performance solutions.  Breadth is essential- you'll have touch points across the mission management, engineering, and production.

This role will be an individual contributor with strong technical leadership responsibilities and will include people management of a small team of mechanical engineers.

Due to the hands-on nature of this role, it requires onsite work at our Mountain View and San Jose locations three days a week.

Responsibilities

• Spacecraft Ownership & Architecture
  • Serve as the Complex Mission Mechanical Lead for a spacecraft class, owning the mechanical architecture and design direction, balancing the needs of multiple concurrent and future missions
  • Define and maintain the mechanical design envelope, interfaces, and configuration control strategy
  • Lead spacecraft evolution initiatives to improve performance, reduce mass, lower cost, and enhance manufacturability across the product line
  • Create and maintain mechanical roadmaps with 1-year+ horizons, anticipating future mission needs and proactively driving platform improvements
  • Ensure mechanical systems are designed for scalability—from prototype builds to constellation quantities
• Customer Engagement 
  • Work directly with customers to understand mission requirements and translate capabilities into compelling technical solutions
  • Contribute mechanical engineering content to proposals, meetings, and reviews, including technical approaches, mass/power budgets, and compliance matrices
  • Partner with Business Development to identify platform enhancement opportunities driven by customer needs
• Technical Leadership & Design Optimization
  • Serve as the definitive technical authority and domain expert for your platform's mechanical systems
  • Apply extensive space industry experience and flight heritage to optimize and mature mechanical designs
  • Use lessons learned from builds, tests, and on-orbit operations to identify design improvements and risk reduction opportunities across the platform
• Best Practices & Standards Definition
  • Define, document, and champion mechanical engineering best practices, design standards, and guidelines that scale across the organization
  • Establish and improve processes for design reviews, documentation, and engineering rigor
  • Refine testing protocols to ensure adequate coverage while minimizing effort
• Mentorship & Team Development
  • Act as a force multiplier by providing strong, hands-on mentorship to mechanical engineers at all levels, developing their technical skills and systems-level thinking
  • Lead rigorous design reviews (PDR, CDR, MRR), providing constructive feedback that elevates the quality of engineering work across the team
  • Guide and coach team members on first-principles problem solving and cross-domain execution
  • Hire, onboard, and manage a small team of mechanical engineers, if needed
• First-Principles Design & Analysis
  • Apply first-principles engineering to solve complex mechanical design challenges, going beyond established approaches when needed
  • Lead the design, analysis, and optimization of spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and mechanical subsystems
  • Perform and/or manage stress, dynamic, and thermal analyses including joint design, stiffness analyses, and mass optimization
  • Work with structural and thermal analysts to iterate and refine designs for performance and manufacturability
  • Make economically sound make vs. buy decisions, balancing rapid capability demonstration with constellation scale-up requirements
• Execution & Delivery
  • Own delivery of mechanical systems, coordinating multidisciplinary efforts between analysts, avionics, thermal, optical, RF, and program teams
  • Lead and improve environmental test campaigns (vibration, TVAC, EMI), applying lessons learned from prior flight programs
  • Influence design decisions to ensure hardware is optimized for both build efficiency and test effectiveness
  • Drive products to scale from prototype builds to quantities of hundreds 

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and testing flight hardware in the space industry
• Demonstrated flight heritage—hardware you designed that has successfully operated in space
• Proven track record of optimizing and maturing existing designs, not just clean-sheet development
• Experience owning or significantly contributing to a spacecraft platform, product line, or major subsystem across multiple missions
• Strong first-principles engineering approach with demonstrated ability to solve complex problems from fundamentals
• Customer-facing experience: technical interchanges, requirements discussions, proposal contributions, or similar
• Demonstrated mentorship experience with success in developing junior and mid-level engineers
• Experience leading or technically guiding teams of engineers and/or technicians
• Deep competence in one or more of: structural mechanics and analysis, thermal management and modeling, environmental testing (TVAC, vibration)
• Strong systems-level thinking with understanding of cross-domain interplay (mechanical, thermal, structural, systems)
• Extensive documentation capabilities: build procedures, test plans, design trades, best practices guides
• Mastery of standard tools: CAD (SolidWorks preferred), PLM, ERP, FEA, test hardware and equipment
• Expert-level skills with drawings, GD&T, BOMs, FAIs, tolerance budgets, and mass budgets
• 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
• A desire to change the way the world understands and reacts to climate and environmental data

Nice-to-have Skills

• Experience as a platform owner, product owner, or product-line technical lead at a space company
• Direct experience contributing to winning proposals (technical volumes, orals, customer Q&A)
• Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices at a departmental or organizational level
• Prior Staff or Lead Engineer title at a space company
• Experience with deployable structures (solar arrays, antennas, mechanisms)
• Optomechanical instrument or payload design experience
• Experience with reaction wheels, torque rods, star trackers, or other ADCS components
• Large assembly management in SolidWorks PDM, Duro, or similar PLM
• Experience running structural analyses (FEMAP, ANSYS)
• Software skills in Python, MATLAB, or similar
• Experience qualifying external vendors and contract manufacturers
• Track record of mentoring engineers who have grown into senior roles

Salary

• The salary range for this role is $201,000 - $223,000, plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits package. Final compensation will be determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location as assessed during the interview process.