Varda Space
Senior Fluid Systems Engineer - Payloads
$140K–$179K
El Segundo, California, United States · Senior · Full-time · Posted Sep 17, 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years of relevant electromechanical hardware experience.
- Education
- BS/BEng in Mechanical, Aerospace, Mechatronics, Biomedical, Chemical, or related engineering discipline.
- Visa sponsorship
- Only hires U.S. persons permitted to access the company’s export-controlled technology without an export license: U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or protected individuals admitted as refugees or granted asylum.
About the job
Develops and owns pharmaceutical fluid-handling payloads for spacecraft, from design and testing through flight, recovery, and iteration.
What you'll do
- Design, analyze, build, and test precision fluid systems and flight hardware.
- Manage payload development across integration, launch, on-orbit operation, reentry, and recovery.
- Create subsystem requirements, verification plans, test reports, and recovery procedures; coordinate across teams and mentor junior engineers.
What they ask for
- BS/BEng in Mechanical, Aerospace, Mechatronics, Biomedical, Chemical, or related engineering discipline.
- 4+ years designing, integrating, testing, and troubleshooting electromechanical hardware.
- Mechanical and fluid systems expertise, plus breadth in an adjacent discipline; experience delivering hardware for rigorous environments.
- Experience with fluid-handling components or compact fluidic assemblies; ability to independently define tasks, manage schedules, and deliver integrated hardware.
Nice to have
- Prior full-cycle ownership of precision fluid-handling hardware in relevant applications.
- Experience with fluid schematics and analysis, compact systems under constraints, aerospace environmental testing, or microgravity and regulated hardware environments.
Pay
USD 140,333 - USD 179,314 per year (base salary)
Tools
Python, MATLAB, FEA, P&IDs, TVAC, EMI/EMC, cGMP
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative