Director of Hardware Engineering

Be one of the first 100 employees at Albedo, where we’re making Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) mainstream by building buses, integrated satellites, and turnkey missions for customers between 250 km - 400 km. As part of the Bedo 100, you’ll have a significant impact on advancing hardware, scaling production, building next-gen flight and ground software, or enabling critical missions for national security and daily life.

About the Role

Albedo is hiring a Director of Hardware Engineering to lead our hardware organization across opto-mechanical, structural, thermal, and avionics disciplines. You’ll own design margin discipline for precision spaceflight hardware, drive the AIT build flow from mirror fabrication through integration and environmental testing, and execute our make-vs-buy strategy as we scale to production. You’ll develop hardware engineering managers, partner closely with production, software, and systems teams, and remain hands-on with high-stakes design and anomaly resolution.

Responsibilities

• Lead the hardware engineering organization — opto-mechanical, structures, thermal, avionics — across approximately three to four teams of managers and individual contributors
• Own design margin discipline against design standards across thermal, structural, radiation, electrical, mass, and optical budgets, making those margins routine rather than heroic
• Drive the AIT build flow from primary mirror unit fabrication through bus-to-payload integration and environmental test, eliminating integration-stage discoveries that should have been caught analytically
• Set and defend make-vs-buy strategy: vertical integration where physics is the moat, aggressive outsourcing of commodity components, with decisions documented and revisited
• Develop hardware engineering managers who can run their domains without requiring your involvement in every technical decision
• Partner with the Director of Software, Systems Engineering, and program management to close the analytical loop between hardware design, flight telemetry, and the next build
• Engage directly in design reviews, anomaly investigations, and supplier technical assessments — operate within the system without becoming a bottleneck

Qualifications

• Twelve-plus years in precision spaceflight hardware, with at least four leading hardware engineering managers
• Hands-on depth in opto-mechanical engineering, structural dynamics, or precision pointing systems — you have personally owned a precision payload or precision pointing chain end-to-end
• Track record of design margin discipline against NASA, MIL, or equivalent standards, with examples where your margin calls held up under flight conditions
• Demonstrated cross-disciplinary system reasoning: you think in budgets across optics, structures, thermal, GNC, mass, and power, and can trace budget violations to root cause
• Experience leading hardware through environmental test campaigns and on-orbit anomaly resolution
• Real make-vs-buy decisions you have owned and can defend with cost, schedule, and capability data
• Comfort holding a schedule against pressure when analysis demands it, and yielding when analysis permits

Benefits

• Employee-friendly equity compensation
• 4% direct matching 401k
• Health Insurance: 100% employee coverage & 75% dependent coverage
• Parental leave and childcare coverage
• Flexible vacation and sick time from day one
• 12 company holidays
• $100 monthly wellness benefit
• Relocation package if not based in Denver

Pay

Salary range: $250,000 to $275,000 per year

Albedo is an equal opportunity employer. Research shows that while men apply to jobs where they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other underrepresented people tend to only apply when they meet 100%. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every qualification — we value how you think, not just which boxes you check.