Mechanical Engineer - Mechanisms & Structures

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Qualifications

• 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, SolidWorks, 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

Preferred Experience

• 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

A note on level and background: 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.

What this job is really like

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 holds rides on your stiffness budget. If you do your best work inside a large, well-resourced program, this isn't it. If you want your fingerprints on a Tbps-class link from the start, this is it.

• EON believes the business should be primarily employee owned. In turn, all compensation offers include company stock options for FTEs.

• Relocation assistance to Los Angeles available.

• A real equipment and lab budget.

Location: Culver City, CA (onsite).