Sitreps, Washington DC
This seat sits between the platform and the customer.
The company sells design software to aerospace primes, satellite manufacturers, and defense programs. Those conversations do not survive a purely commercial owner. You have to be credible enough to defend the physics and the modeling in a technical review, then explain the same thing to a program manager who controls the budget.
You are not being hired to ship production software. The engineering team does that. You are being hired to be genuinely hands-on with the models: scripting, analysis, benchmarking, and validation, deep enough to diagnose a bad result yourself and hold your ground when a customer's engineers push back.
You will report directly to the founder and CEO, who holds a doctorate in physics and wrote the original algorithms behind the platform. As the U.S. entity's security and compliance infrastructure matures, the seat moves under the CTO.
The company expects this role's scope to expand materially inside roughly the first six months as the U.S. leadership team gets built out. That is the pattern it has followed with every important hire so far.
The Company
A venture-backed AI software company whose platform designs spacecraft hardware. It generates antenna, power, and propulsion designs in days, work that normally takes engineering teams months.
The models are the company's own, built over years of applied machine learning research rather than layered on top of a large language model. A natural-language interface now sits over the platform.
Customers include a top-tier international aerospace manufacturer flying high-profile missions and a U.S. satellite constellation manufacturer led by veterans of a major commercial space program. The company also collaborates with a federally funded national research laboratory.
Funding is seed-stage, raised largely from U.S. defense investors. The team is under 20 people: most are engineers and physicists based overseas, several holding doctorates, with a small business and strategy group in the U.S. Headquarters is in Los Angeles. It is a software company that happens to have started in spacecraft. Near-term programs are satellite hardware, and the intent is to take the same models into other domains.
Approximately $200,000 base salary plus meaningful equity, with real flexibility above that band for an exceptional candidate. The option pool was deliberately topped up at the last round, so grants at this level are substantive rather than nominal.
Headquarters is Los Angeles, with Washington, D.C. a live second hub given how much of the company's work now pulls there. The company is building toward a concentrated U.S. team rather than a distributed one. Expect periodic in-person time, on the order of a week a month. Where the center of gravity ultimately sits will follow where the team concentrates.
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Source: the Sitreps Greenhouse job board. We last checked this job 5 h ago. We first saw it 8 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now. We found this job board in a public list. We did not yet compare it with the careers page of the company.
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This base pay is below the median for director-level software engineering jobs in other US places.
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