The Role
Design and own precision mechanical hardware for VLEO spacecraft and optical payloads. Responsibilities include tolerance stack-ups, mechanical error budgets, athermalization, structural and thermal analysis support, GD&T drawings, vendor and manufacturing collaboration, optical alignment, metrology, environmental testing, and anomaly resolution. The role requires end-to-end ownership of flight or fielded opto-mechanical hardware and close collaboration with optical, systems, thermal, and integration teams.
Summary Generated by Built In
Be one of the Bedo 100
Albedo is making Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) mainstream, building the infrastructure to enable every satellite mission to enter this new orbital domain. We build buses, integrated satellites, and turnkey missions for customers to thrive in VLEO, below 300 km, where proximity compounds performance and drag self-cleans debris.
As part of the first 100 employees at Albedo, you will have a big impact on Albedo’s trajectory to proliferating VLEO — whether you’re advancing hardware to increase satellite longevity, scaling production for large constellations, building next-gen flight and ground software to push performance, or enabling missions that matter for national security and our day-to-day life here on Earth.
How We Operate: Albedo takes a first-principles approach — in space and in business. We move with speed, take calculated risks, and learn quickly. We use AI regularly to create leverage in every discipline across the company. We work in-person at our Broomfield, CO HQ to maximize team and company productivity. We work hard and with urgency to compound our first-mover advantage.
Who We're Looking For: Builders who want to own outcomes, not tasks. Systems thinkers who balance precision with iteration while thinking about the big picture. Individuals who are energized by creating a category rather than competing in an existing one. You’ll join a team that has already proven what others said wasn’t feasible and is now scaling and upgrading our VLEO buses & payloads to serve mission sets across sensing, communications, and responsive operations.
If you can feel the excitement running through your veins, apply to be one of the Bedo 100.
What You’ll Do:
- Design precision mechanical hardware across our spacecraft product lines and for Verity and follow-on payloads: structures, assemblies, boxes, mechanisms, sensors and actuators, optic mounts, optical benches, metering structures, flexures, and kinematic and bonded interfaces.
- Own the mechanical side of a performance error budget: allocate tolerances, run the stack-up, and prove the allocation closes.
- Responsible for mechanical allocations for fabrication, alignment, and stability, contributing to the system-level wavefront error (WFE) budget and driving mechanical performance through daily cross-functional engineering tradeoffs.
- Have some familiarity with structural and thermal-elastic analysis, and be able to work with the mechanical analysis team to support FEA and optical performance analysis
- Design for athermalization and dimensional stability: material selection, athermal mount schemes, and the creep, hysteresis, and gravity-release behavior that decides whether alignment holds.
- Own your parts through fabrication: drawings and GD&T, vendor interaction, inspection, and the manufacturability conversation with machinists.
- Support optical alignment and integration hands-on. Be in the lab for metrology and integration of the hardware you designed.
- Support environmental testing and root-cause anomalies when hardware and analysis disagree.
- Partner with optical design, systems, thermal, and AI&T so mechanical constraints land in the plan early, not as surprises.
- You have owned a tolerance stack-up or mechanical error budget and driven it to closure, in any domain where a mechanical structure had to hold a demanding performance requirement.
- You have either performed structural or thermal analysis or have familiarity with analysis processes, including the importance of scoping and selecting modeling approaches appropriate to the needed scope.’
- Familiarity with interferometric testing and optical metrology, including phase-shifting interferometry and CGH alignment, to support optical alignment campaigns and interpret metrology data to guide mechanical adjustments and system-level performance.
- You have released real drawings with GD&T, worked directly with machinists and vendors, and been corrected by manufacturing.
- You want end-to-end hardware ownership rather than a narrow analysis or drafting slice.
- Opto-mechanical depth. You've worked on flight or fielded opto-mechanical hardware that had to hold an optical performance spec through environments, and you've owned an optical error-budget allocation and driven it to closure.
- You have designed athermal mounts and can reason about material selection for dimensional stability beyond CTE matching, and you've been in the lab for optical alignment and metrology on hardware you designed.
- If you come from semiconductor equipment, precision metrology, medical devices, scientific instrumentation, robotics, or motorsport rather than space or optics, you are the candidate this posting was rewritten for. The transferable skill is holding micron-scale geometry through thermal and dynamic environments.
- $150,056 - $171,360 per year
Compensation and Benefits for Full-Time Roles:
- 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
The final compensation package is subject to change if the candidate's experience and company need drive a different job level than originally slated for the position.
Albedo does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to Albedo employees. Albedo is not responsible for any fees or overhead related to unsolicited resumes.
Additional Requirements: In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire. All persons hired will be required to be a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident of the U.S., or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled: Albedo is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Relocation: Relocation support for this position is available
Applicants must be a U.S. Person as defined under 22 CFR 120.62
#LI-Onsite
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% of the qualifications. At Albedo, we'd rather hear from you. We care more about how you think than which boxes you check. We value people who do the math, make their assumptions explicit, and ask the annoying questions: what breaks, what's the failure mode, what has to be true for this to work? If that sounds like you, apply, even if you don't meet every line.
Skills Required
- Experience owning tolerance stack-ups or mechanical error budgets and driving them to closure
- Familiarity with structural or thermal analysis and appropriate modeling approaches
- Familiarity with interferometric testing and optical metrology, including phase-shifting interferometry and CGH alignment
- Experience releasing drawings with GD&T and working directly with machinists and vendors
- Experience with end-to-end hardware ownership
- Opto-mechanical experience with flight or fielded hardware that maintained optical performance through environmental conditions
- Experience owning optical error-budget allocations and driving them to closure
- Experience designing athermal mounts and selecting materials for dimensional stability
- Hands-on experience with optical alignment and metrology
- U.S. Person status as defined under 22 CFR 120.62
- U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residency, protected-individual status, or eligibility to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations
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The Company
What We Do
Albedo is the first space company to commercialize and provide platform capabilities to the new orbit regime of VLEO. VLEO — very low Earth orbit — transforms satellite capabilities by operating twice as close to Earth, enabling dramatic improvements in performance while reducing system costs. Albedo’s first satellite Clarity-1 — launched in March 2025 and now operating in VLEO — exemplifies the disruptive potential of the company’s proprietary VLEO platform. Clarity-1 delivers imagery at a resolution previously exclusive to drones & aircraft or billion-dollar classified satellites, while showcasing a platform that can support a variety of mission types. The world is rapidly changing and a new level of visibility and transparency is required to solve some of our largest problems. Albedo’s 10cm visible and 2m thermal imagery will fuel insights for industries such as mapping, insurance, utilities, solar, agriculture, carbon offsets, infrastructure sustainability, national security, and much more.
