Mechanical Engineer - Mechanisms & Structures

About EON

EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal.

EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City.

EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal.

EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City.
Today, approximately 95% of the global internet travels through a few hundred subsea fiber-optic cables, infrastructure designed in the early 2000s that has gone largely unchanged. Demand for new fiber has never been higher, but laying it is extraordinarily difficult: permits, ocean geology, and geopolitical boundaries make every new cable a years-long, billion-dollar undertaking. That bottleneck is a liability with cables at constant risk of being cut, whether by accident or adversarial action, and no amount of ground-based investment can fully solve it.

The Role
Our ground terminal needs gimbals, coarse-steering mechanisms, and structures that point a telescope at a moving satellite and survive years in the field, designed from the start for production and repeatable assembly. We are seeking a mechanical engineer to own the terminal's mechanisms and structures, from the demonstrator's first build through designs that can be manufactured for every ground station. You'll own the terminal-scale mechanisms and structures, partnering with the optomechanical seats whose sub-micron optical mounts ride on your hardware, and with the PAT, GNC, and Thermal seats on the budgets that flow through it.

• Design the terminal's gimbal and coarse-steering mechanisms: bearings, drives, encoders, and the stiffness and backlash budgets the PAT loop points through
• Design the terminal structures: telescope support, enclosures, and the load paths that hold optical alignment through wind, thermal, and handling loads
• Own structural analysis for stiffness, modal behavior, and survival loads, and correlate models to test
• Define mechanism requirements with the PAT and GNC seats (slew rates, pointing stiffness, jitter contributions) and carry them into hardware
• Work with the Thermal seat on the structural-thermal behavior that drives pointing and alignment stability
• Drive design-for-manufacturability and repeatable assembly, so the demonstrator terminal becomes a build recipe rather than a one-off
• Select and manage suppliers and machine shops for structures and mechanism components, from prototype through production
• Support terminal integration and field deployment, owning mechanical issues from bench to site

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in mechanical engineering or a related discipline
• Mechanism design depth: gimbals, rotation stages, actuators, bearings, and drive trains
• Structural design and analysis experience, with proficiency in FEA (ANSYS Mechanical or equivalent)
• Proficiency in professional 3D CAD (NX, Solid Works, Creo, or equivalent), including toleranced drawings for fabrication
• Hands-on prototyping, assembly, and test experience
• Comfort moving fast and making sound calls without complete data

• Precision pointing mechanisms: telescope mounts, antenna gimbals, or tracking pedestals
• Designing for outdoor or field-deployed hardware: sealing, corrosion, and wind and seismic loads
• Motion-control adjacency: encoders, servo drives, and mechanism-level tuning alongside controls engineers
• Design-for-manufacturability and design-for-assembly for low-rate production
• Optomechanical adjacency: kinematic mounts, athermalization, or structures that hold optical alignment
• Environmental test (vibration, shock, thermal cycling) for mechanisms and structures
• Materials selection for stiffness, weight, and thermal stability trades

We hire this role at all levels, from Associate through Senior and Principal Mechanical Engineer, and calibrate title, scope, and compensation to your experience. If this list doesn't perfectly match your background still reach out. We are always looking for exceptional people from many disciplines.

We're a seed-stage company building toward first light on a single-route demonstrator. There's no program office and no requirements team. The terminal that points at space is your hardware: you'll design it once for the demonstrator, then design it to be built again at every station, and every microradian the pointing loop…