Manager, Mechanical and Thermal Systems

Third-party recruiters: Please do not contact us about this role.Manager, Mechanical and Thermal Systems

At ICEYE, we design, build and operate the largest fleet of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites in the world. Using advanced technology, our constellation collects topographical data about any location on Earth, day or night, through any weather conditions.

Headquartered in Southern California, our customers are society’s heroes – intelligence professionals, warfighters, first responders, and scientific researchers. As a trusted mission partner, the United States and its allies depend on us for critical information when it matters most.

Role Description

ICEYE US is developing next-generation spaceborne SAR payloads and full space vehicles and is seeking a Manager, Mechanical & Thermal Systems to lead the engineering team responsible for mechanical structures, mechanisms, deployable, and thermal control. Sitting within the Space Systems engineering team, this role owns the full mechanical and thermal subsystem lifecycle — from early architecture and trade studies through environmental verification and flight acceptance — while building and leading a team of mechanical and thermal engineers.

The manager will oversee payload-to-bus interface definition, structural integrity, thermal margin compliance, and environmental test campaigns for flight hardware. They will coordinate daily with RF, avionics, systems engineering, and AIT teams, and serve as the primary mechanical and thermal technical authority across all program lifecycle reviews.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of mechanical and thermal engineers; own hiring, onboarding, performance development, and technical career growth for direct reports.

• Accountable for design and analysis of mechanical structures, mechanisms, and deployables for small- to mid-size space hardware, with a focus on adapting existing designs for space vehicle integration.

• Own the structures and mechanisms engineering lifecycle, including requirements decomposition, interface definition, and verification and validation closure for various programs.

• Ensure mechanical and structural designs meet all thermal, vibration, acoustic, and load requirements across the full environmental envelope.

• Collaborate with cross-functional subsystem teams — RF, thermal, avionics, and AIT — to satisfy mass, volume, structural margin, and manufacturability constraints.

• Lead environmental test planning and execution for the flight article, including thermal vacuum (TVAC), vibration, shock, and deployment testing; own test data review and disposition.

• Define and optimize manufacturing and assembly processes to support producibility, scaling across bus implementations, and schedule-driven build milestones.