Mechanical Engineer - Mechanisms & Structures
About EON
EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal. EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City.
Today, approximately 95% of the global internet travels through a few hundred subsea fiber-optic cables, infrastructure designed in the early 2000s that has gone largely unchanged. Demand for new fiber has never been higher, but laying it is extraordinarily difficult: permits, ocean geology, and geopolitical boundaries make every new cable a years-long, billion-dollar undertaking. That bottleneck is a liability with cables at constant risk of being cut, whether by accident or adversarial action, and no amount of ground-based investment can fully solve it.
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.
Compensation + Benefits
In addition to base salary (to be determined on a case by case basis), compensation for this role includes:
EON believes the business should be primarily employee owned. In turn, all compensation offers include company stock options for FTEs.
Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental insurance with significant cost covered by the company for yourself and dependents.
Paid parental leave and flexible PTO (3 weeks accrued vacation and 10 company holidays per year).
Relocation assistance to Los Angeles available.
A real equipment and lab budget.
Location: Culver City, CA (onsite).
Endeavor Optical Network is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with EON is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.