Senior Vehicle Engineer

Space is the infrastructure layer for humanity’s next industrial revolution. While reusable rockets have opened the door, true economic transformation requires infrastructure that makes orbit as accessible and reliable as air travel. At Lux Aeterna, we’re building that future by developing the first reusable satellite platform with controlled return capability - transforming space from a one-way street into a two-way highway for innovation and commerce.

We are looking for a Senior Vehicle Engineer to own the vehicle at the mission level. Structures, GNC, flight software, propulsion, power, thermal, and ground each have an owner and must work together at the vehicle level. On your mission, you are the person who makes sure they add up to a spacecraft that launches, operates, returns, and flies again. You’ll hold the vehicle-level requirements, budgets, and interfaces for your mission, you’ll be the technical point of contact for customer payloads and the launch provider, and you’ll be in the high bay when the hardware comes together.

This role is mission-focused by design. You start by owning one vehicle through flight and reflight. As the fleet grows, the role can grow with it into ownership of the product baseline for a vehicle line. This is a unique opportunity to:

• Own the vehicle-level technical baseline for your mission, from requirements through reflight
• Carry a full vehicle through design, integration, environmental test, launch, and return, then apply what you learn to our next-generation vehicles
• Help shape how Lux Aeterna does vehicle-level engineering as the company scales
• Work directly with the CEO and engineering leads on the decisions that shape the vehicle
• Grow into product-level ownership as the fleet grows, if that is where you want to take it

• Pioneering Technology: We’re developing the first reusable satellite platform with controlled return capability, fundamentally transforming space from a one-way journey to a two-way highway
• Real Impact: Your work will enable new industries in space manufacturing, research, and logistics while pioneering sustainable space infrastructure
• Speed & Autonomy: We maintain parallel hardware development streams and empower engineers to innovate rapidly while upholding rigorous aerospace standards
• World-Class Team: Work alongside experts from leading aerospace companies and research institutions, building technology that will reshape humanity’s access to space

You’ll be the engineer accountable for your mission’s vehicle closing as a system, including:

• Owning the vehicle-level requirements for your mission and flowing them down to subsystems in a way that is traceable without being bureaucratic
• Owning and maintaining your vehicle’s budgets: mass, power, link, pointing, thermal, propellant, and data, and driving margin decisions with the subsystem leads
• Owning interface control on your mission: between subsystems, between the vehicle and customer payloads, and between the vehicle and the launch provider
• Serving as the technical point of contact for your mission’s payload customers from ICD through integration, test, and on-orbit operations
• Building and running the verification program for your vehicle: the requirements-to-test matrix, environmental test planning, and closure of every requirement before ship
• Leading mission-level trade studies and concept of operations development, and contributing to platform-level trades as they come up
• Running design reviews, failure investigations, and root cause analysis across disciplines
• Executing the requalification and reflight criteria for your vehicle and feeding what you learn back into the platform standard: what gets inspected, what gets replaced, and what has…