Structures Design Reliability Engineer Long , California,

At Vast, our mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space. Vast is developing next-generation space stations to ensure a continuous human presence in space for America and its allies, enabling advanced microgravity research and manufacturing, and unlocking a new space economy for government, corporate, and private customers. Using an incremental, hardware-rich and low-cost approach, Vast is rapidly developing its multi-module Haven Station.

Haven Demo’s 2025 success made Vast the only operational commercial space station company to fly and operate its own spacecraft. Next, Haven-1 is expected to become the world’s first commercial space station when it launches, followed by additional Haven modules to enable permanent human presence by 2030. Our team is all-in, committed to executing our mission safely and on time.

Vast is looking for a Structures Design Reliability Engineer
, reporting to the Sr. Manager of Design Reliability
, to guide the design, verification, and validation of Haven-1, the world’s first commercial human‑rated space station.

This will be a full‑time
, exempt position located in our Long Beach location.

• Guide design of primary and secondary structures on a large-scale space station.
• Cultivate Vast's understanding of static and dynamic loads, vibrations, thermal and other environmental considerations to drive design decisions.
• Lead the technical reviews providing clear, decisive guidance of mechanical design and analysis, manufacturing drawings, test plans, concept of operations during milestone design reviews and major risk gates.
• Provide critical peer review and approval of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns.
• Ensure that the Vasts design process & design criteria/requirements are being followed for flight, launch, and ground support systems.
• Set the standard for acceptance and qualification test completeness for flight systems, ensuring our test campaigns are robust, disciplined, and aligned with human-rated reliability.
• Bring deep engineering intuition to test campaigns, identifying risks early and helping teams converge on safe, resilient solutions.
• Architect Vast’s structures engineering standards, design guides, and review frameworks; build tools that enable fast, confident decision-making at all levels across the company.
• Develop design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches to support haven-1 design architecture.
• Make engineering best practices accessible and actionable, especially for engineers moving rapidly under ambitious program timelines.
• Support and elevate engineering teams across the organization by bringing broad experience in design, build cycles, integration, and test.
• Turn organizational knowledge into lasting guidance by capturing lessons learned and strengthening future standards.

• Build and steward the processes that ensure engineering rigor at scale—ensuring designs meet standards, reviews are comprehensive, and changes are consistently implemented.
• Own and continuously refine design review templates, reliability checklists, and internal design guides.
• Track design maturity and compliance across the station and vehicle architecture, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
• Build tools, frameworks, and automation that empower engineers to explore design trade-offs and risks with clarity and speed.

• Work across all facets of the engineering organization to improve vehicle reliability.
• Partner with configuration and change management so that every update to flight hardware is intentional, reviewed, and fully understood.
• Drive technical trades for the vehicle and enable decisions backed by strong physics-based engineering rationale.
• Coordinate between Change Management, Risk, and Engineering teams to ensure design revisions drive continuous improvement on the vehicle.
• Partner with the internal software team to ensure system data, configuration details, and design decisions are well organized and accessible.
• Partner with the Risk management team to identify risk, and drive design…