Varda Space
Senior Ground Support Mechanical Design Engineer
$140K–$179K
El Segundo, California, United States · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 27, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years of industry experience in mechanical design or industrial automation.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, or related technical field.
- Visa sponsorship
- Only hires “U.S. persons” permitted to access the company’s technology without an export license: U.S. citizens, U.S. lawful permanent residents, or protected individuals admitted as refugees or granted asylum.
About the job
Designs, builds, commissions, and maintains ground support equipment and test infrastructure for qualifying spaceflight hardware and supporting manufacturing operations.
What you'll do
- Develop and own test systems and GSE, including propulsion stands, environmental test equipment, DAQ systems, and gas/liquid systems.
- Integrate mechanical, electrical, fluid, and instrumentation systems; build and wire cabinets and support commissioning.
- Maintain test infrastructure, support internal PLC and EtherCAT tooling, and document systems and procedures.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of industry experience in mechanical design or industrial automation.
- Experience with Solidworks, NX CAD, or comparable; electrical wiring; and Altium or comparable schematic design software.
- Hands-on experience with high-pressure gas or fluid systems, environmental testing, complex test infrastructure, industrial communication protocols, and a modern PLC ecosystem (or eagerness to develop expertise in Beckhoff TwinCAT 3).
Nice to have
- Aerospace experience, particularly spacecraft testing or GSE development; familiarity with spacecraft qualification standards.
- Experience with safety-related control systems and risk reduction; programming in firmware or Python.
Pay
USD 140,333 - 179,314 per year (base salary)
Tools
Solidworks, NX CAD, Altium, EPLAN, Beckhoff TwinCAT 3, EtherCAT, Modbus (TCP/RTU), Python
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative