Director of Spacecraft Structure & Mission Hardware

About the role

Muon seeks an experienced leader to guide our Bus Structure and Missions team through our next stage of rapid growth. This team has a large scope including designing & owning our spacecraft bus structures, GSE, testbeds, and tailoring each to specific mission needs. The role reports to Muon’s Senior Director of Hardware Engineering and has strong talent in mechanical, thermal, structural, and electrical engineering reporting to them.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned, cross-disciplined leader who is experienced at organizing and scaling rapidly growing teams and has strong program management skills. Experience with designing and manufacturing low volume, high mix products efficiently is a must.

This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our San Jose, CA office three days per week.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team to architect, design, analyze, and qualify a catalog of bus platforms to meet a wide range of mission requirements.
• Collaborate with Product, Business Development, System Engineering, Software Engineering, Operations, and more to ensure buses meet the needs of our growing portfolio of customer missions.
• Collaborate with Mission Management and our customers to understand mission specific and instrument specific needs.
• Implement instances of our bus platforms for these missions. Ensure all mission milestones are met.
• Own Spacecraft level structural and thermal analysis & bus level testing strategies. 
• Produce and maintain mission specific hardware-in-the-loop testbeds to enable integrated software and hardware testing on a flight-representative system.
• Support new mission proposals, contribute to cost models, and ensure mission feasibility pre-contract.
• Own design of mechanical and electrical ground support equipment (MGSE & EGSE) required for production of spacecraft platforms.
• Mentor and support multiple levels of team managers and enable scalable growth within the team.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing and/or managing the design of complex, high reliability systems that operate in harsh environments (spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, drones, etc).
• 8+ years of people management experience managing engineers and engineering managers.
• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
• Excellent leadership, program management, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills.
• Proven experience managing complex engineering projects from concept to deployment, including budget and schedule management.
• Ability to rapidly change roles/responsibilities while working in a high-paced, rewarding work environment with new challenges each week.