Mechanical Engineer - Mechanisms & Structures at EON in Culver City, CA

Job description

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 thr