Spacecraft System Architect Lead

At Stoke, we believe a thriving space economy will enable a vibrant, sustainable, and equitable future here on Earth. That is why we’re building Nova, our fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle. Designed for daily flight, Nova tackles the core challenges of space transportation by reducing cost, increasing availability, and improving reliability. By radically lowering launch costs and increasing flight cadence, we’re helping create a truly scalable space industry.

Our team is mission-driven, collaborative, and empowered to take ownership of their work. If you want to work alongside some of the most dedicated and talented people on Earth, we’d love to have you join us.

This is a new organization within Stoke, with a goal to develop products on a 3–10 year horizon that grow Stoke beyond launch. Nova moves mass to orbit. This group takes on what comes next: spacecraft and on-orbit mobility that move mass to any orbit, downmass that returns it to Earth, and the satellites, platforms and factories that put mass to work once it is there.

The organization is small by design, and everyone here carries a second hat.

As Spacecraft System Architect Lead you are one of the founding technical members of this new team. You will take customer input and business goals and turn them into a conceptual system architecture, a concept of operations, system requirements and a product breakdown, then carry that architecture through detailed design, build, test, flight and on-orbit operations. You will make the early cross-disciplinary trades (propulsion, GNC, power, thermal, structures, avionics, software, ground) with limited information and own the consequences, on vehicles that must work for years, not hours.

You will decide what we build, what we buy and what we partner for, and you will help grow the team around the product. You will learn from integrated test and flight and feed it back into the next architecture. You must be ready to stay focused, move fast, self-direct, and learn on the fly.

• Translate customer and business objectives into system concepts, Con Ops, functional capabilities and system requirements for the group’s products.
• Develop the product breakdown and perform first-order analysis across every discipline to size the system and estimate mass, power, cost and performance with incomplete information.
• Make the early cross-disciplinary trades (propulsion, GNC, power, thermal, structures, avionics, software, ground) with limited information, and carry them through architecture and design reviews.
• Establish design margins, reliability targets and an incremental development path from first demonstration to production.
• Define interfaces to Nova and to customer systems; select and manage external partners for major subsystems, owning requirements, interface control and acceptance.
• Support the full product lifecycle: detailed design, integration, test, launch and on-orbit operations; feed lessons learned back into the next architecture.
• Be the technical face of the product with customers and partners alongside Stoke's business development team.
• Act as program lead for schedule, budget and risk through first flight, and help grow the engineering team as the product matures.
• Bachelor's degree in aerospace, mechanical, electrical engineering, physics or a related field.
• 10+ years of spacecraft or launch vehicle engineering experience, including at least one spacecraft carried from concept through on-orbit operations.
• Experience as a chief engineer, system architect, vehicle lead or equivalent accountable technical role on a spacecraft or stage.
• Exceptional command of fundamentals in one or more of structures, propulsion, thermal, power, GNC, avionics or software, and the…