Director of Hardware Engineering Full Time

About this role:

Albedo is hiring a Director of Hardware Engineering to lead our hardware org across opto-mechanical, structural, thermal, and avionics disciplines. You'll own the design margin discipline for precision spaceflight hardware, drive the AIT build flow from mirror fabrication through integration and environmental testing, and execute our make-vs-buy strategy across the org as we scale to production. You'll develop hardware engineering managers, partner closely with production, software, and systems, and stay hands-on with the highest-stakes design and anomaly work.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead the hardware engineering organization — opto-mechanical, structures, thermal, avionics — across approximately three to four teams of managers and ICs
• Own design margin discipline against design standards across thermal, structural, radiation, electrical, mass, and optical budgets, and make those margins routine rather than heroic
• Drive the AIT build flow from primary mirror unit fabrication through bus-to-payload integration through environmental test, eliminating the integration-stage discoveries that should have been caught analytically
• Set and defend make-vs-buy strategy: vertical integration where the physics is the moat, aggressive outsourcing of commodity, decisions documented and revisited
• Develop hardware engineering managers who can run their domains without requiring you in every technical decision
• Partner with the Director of Software, Systems Engineering, and program management to close the analytical loop between hardware design, flight telemetry, and the next build
• Engage directly in design reviews, anomaly investigations, and supplier technical assessments — operate in the system without becoming a bottleneck

Your Ideal Skills and Experience:

• Twelve-plus years in precision spaceflight hardware, with at least four leading hardware engineering managers
• Hands-on depth in opto-mechanical engineering, structural dynamics, or precision pointing systems — you have personally owned a precision payload or precision pointing chain end-to-end
• Track record of design margin discipline against NASA, MIL, or equivalent standards, with examples where your margin calls held up under flight conditions
• Demonstrated cross-disciplinary system reasoning: you think in budgets across optics, structures, thermal, GNC, mass, and power, and you can trace budget violations to root cause
• Experience leading hardware through environmental test campaigns and on-orbit anomaly resolution
• Real make-vs-buy decisions you have owned and can defend with cost, schedule, and capability data
• Comfort holding a schedule against pressure when the analysis demands it, and yielding when the analysis says you can

Salary Range:

• $250,000 to $275,000 per year