VP of Engineering

About the Opportunity

Almost everything humanity has ever put in orbit was built to be thrown away. Our client is one of a small number of teams working to change that, building a satellite platform designed to come home, get refurbished, and fly again.

They are a seed-funded Denver startup, small enough that the whole engineering team fits in one room today, and far enough along that their first vehicle is manifested for flight and the payload capacity on it is already spoken for. They hold agreements with NASA supporting the core reentry technology. The founder is an engineer who spent his career building spacecraft at some of the highest-cadence programs in the industry before starting this. 

The hard part is the return. Getting mass to orbit is a commercial problem that humanity has largely solved. Getting it back intact, on schedule, and cheaply enough that reflying beats rebuilding, is not. That is the engineering problem this team exists to solve, and this role leads the engineering team to solve it.

This is a direct hire, permanent placement position for a client of AdAstra Talent Advisors.

What You'll Own

The engineering team is around 15 people. Your job is to grow it to 50 while shipping hardware along the way.

• The org. Structure, hiring plan, performance, and growth across every subsystem team. You own who gets hired and how fast.

• Recruiting. You will personally close senior engineers.

• Execution. Schedules, design reviews, BOM releases, test campaigns, integration milestones. 

• Process. Requirements management, configuration control, anomaly resolution, a design review cadence people actually respect. Enough rigor to fly, not so much that it slows the team down.

• Suppliers. Vendor relationships in a constrained aerospace supply chain, and holding them to delivery.

• Risk. Partnering with program management so schedule reality stays visible to leadership before it becomes a surprise.

• Culture. Intellectual honesty, bias for action, candid communication. You set the tone by how you behave in a design review.

What They're Looking For

• You have taken an engineering org through this transition. Roughly 15 to 50, or you joined somewhere at 20 to 50 and helped take it to 200. Either works. What matters is that you have personally done the scaling, not inherited an org that was already large.

• You have shipped hardware like this, at a company like this. Spacecraft, hypersonics, or reentry systems taken from design through qualification, integration, and flight.

• You bring people with you. The best leaders have a network that follows them to their next role. This is an advantage in working trust. Plus it’s faster.

• You have the technical depth to earn respect. It’s unlikely you’ll design parts. You do need to whiteboard well, sit down with an engineer who is stuck, and be believed in the room. Credibility is earned from your technical depth and what you have built.

• You know which processes to leverage and which to skip. As the company scales, it’s on you to know where process enhances, and where it gets in the way.

• Direct, low-ego communication style. Say the hard thing early.

Requirements

• 10 years developing spacecraft, launch vehicles, or complex aerospace hardware, with 5 years leading engineering teams

• Track record taking hardware from design through qualification, integration, and flight

• Deep familiarity with the full spacecraft development lifecycle: structures, avionics, propulsion, thermal, GNC, and software

• Experience scaling a team and building engineering process at a startup or a fast-moving program

• Strong supplier management instincts in a constrained aerospace supply chain

• U.S. Person status (see ITAR note below)

If you have most of this and not all of it, apply anyway. The team cares more about what you have delivered than about a checklist.

Preferred Experience

• Satellites, hypersonics, or reentry and thermal protection systems specifically

• Grown multiple teams across multiple product lines inside one company

• Denver-based, or an existing engineering network in the Denver metro

• Experience with defense or government space customers

ITAR Requirement

• To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by ITAR (22 CFR §120.15), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.  

What Success Looks Like

• The engineering org triples without the bar dropping.

• The first vehicle flies on schedule, and the team learns fast enough from it that the second one is better.

• Design reviews get sharper. Problems surface early because people are not afraid to raise them.

• The founder isn’t the bottleneck on engineering execution and gets to run the company.

Benefit Highlights

💸 $225,000 to $300,000 base salary, depending on experience

📈 Meaningful equity in a seed-stage company

❤️ Health, dental, and vision coverage

🚀 A first flight vehicle (with reentry) inside your first eighteen months, which is not a thing most engineering leaders get to say

🛠️ An in-house engineering and integration facility, so the hardware is down the hall

🌟 A founder who is an engineer, and

🪑 An executive seat with real authority over how the technical organization gets built

Equal Opportunity

Our client is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

About AdAstra

AdAstra Talent Advisors is a headhunting and talent advising firm focused on the Climate, Space, and Defense sectors of Hard Tech. We specialize in pairing highly technical and executive talent with some of the world’s leading Hard Tech startups.

At AdAstra, we catalyze the innovations that future generations depend on by placing the right people in the right seats. Our dedicated work enables inconceivable technology from Earth, to the stars. And it’s all because of trailblazing talent like you - those driven to do what’s never been done before. 

We care about long term relationships with both candidates and companies. Even if the role we initially discuss isn’t a perfect fit, it’s likely we’ll have something relevant to share with you in the future. 

Join us on our journey by following along via LinkedIn!

CEO, Seyka Mejeur  |  LinkedIn profile

CTO / COO, Brian Mejeur  |  LinkedIn profile

AdAstra Talent Advisors  |  LinkedIn profile

AdAstra Website