Production Mechanical Engineer, Space
Costa Mesa · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00) · USD 129,000-171,000 · 4+ years experience · Full-time · Posted Oct 14, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 4+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Location
- Costa Mesa · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00)
- Salary
- USD 129,000-171,000 · Base salary
About the role
- You'll own the production readiness of space hardware — take maturing and flight-proven designs and drive them to repeatable, higher-rate manufacturing.
- Intelligently pace design changes with a holistic view of the program and its build schedule.
Responsibilities
- Use first principles as a basis for decisions and continuously look for opportunities to simplify designs, reduce part count, and design for manufacturing, assembly, and test (DFM/DFA/DFT) — improving producibility, repeatability, and reliability at higher production quantities
- Modify and mature existing designs to resolve problems realized in production – fit, tolerance, assembly, and yield issues
- Update designs to reduce build and test cycle times, improve first-pass yield, and remove bottlenecks from assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) operations
- Own bills of material (BOMs) and engineering drawings – release and maintain part and assembly drawings, GD&T, and BOM structure; process engineering changes (ECO/ECN) and manage revisions and effectivity
- Propagate engineering changes through assembly hierarchies — revise parent assembly models, drawings, and BOMs when subcomponent designs change, ensuring next-higher-level documentation stays current and consistent
- Act as the Responsible Engineer for your hardware in production: disposition nonconformances, author red-lines and rework/retrofit instructions
- Partner with manufacturing, supply chain, and test engineering to transition designs from low-rate to higher-rate production and to stand up repeatable work instructions, tooling, and fixtures
- Build and validate prototypes and production trial builds, analyze failures, and feed lessons learned back into the design and the build process
- Travel to test sites, production facilities, and vendors as needed
- Create excellent technical documentation – assembly and work instructions, procedures, test plans and reports, vendor specifications and statements of work, etc.
Requirements
- BS or higher degree in engineering or a hard science
- CAD skills (any platform) and ability to make high quality engineering drawings that meet common industry standards, including GD&T
- Experience taking hardware designs into manufacturing and production – design for manufacturing/assembly and drawing release. Experience transitioning hardware from prototype or low-rate to higher-rate production
- Working knowledge of BOM structures, revision control, and engineering change orders (ECO/ECN), ideally within a PLM/PDM system
- Demonstrated hands-on fabrication and assembly skills. Experience working with hand tools, mill, lathe, etc.
- Strong understanding of engineering fundamentals: heat transfer, statics, solid mechanics, materials
- Familiarity with tolerance analysis and inspection methods
- Excellent attention to detail
- Highly motivated, self-starting, and able to perform duties autonomously without supervision
- Very organized and willing to establish scope and requirements for ill-defined problems
Preferred qualifications
- 4+ years of mechanical design or production/sustaining engineering experience in a professional setting with space hardware
- Experience in NX/Teamcenter or equivalent CAD/PLM
- Experience with nonconformance disposition and Material Review Board, root cause and corrective action (RCCA), and first article inspection (FAI)
- Experience designing tooling, fixtures, and ground support equipment to improve build and test throughput
- Ability to integrate electronic components (PCBAs, motors, sensors, etc.) into mechanical designs
- Experience developing code in higher-level languages (e.g. Python, MATLAB, C++) for analytical models, data acquisition, and automation
- Experience with statistical process control, tolerance stack-ups, or design of experiments (DOE) to improve yield
Benefits
- Highly competitive equity grants included in the majority of full time offers
- Top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including support in health, recovery, and more
Skills
- CAD
- GD&T
- PLM
- PDM
- NX
- Teamcenter
- Python
- MATLAB
- C++
