Composites Engineer

About the Company
The sun's light contains 24 trillion times more energy than humanity uses today — an unending source of energy that powers all life on Earth.

This company captures that sunlight and brings it back down to Earth using mirrors in space, powering a solar future and lighting the world after the sun has set.

About the Role
As a Composites Engineer, you'll own the engineering, development, and production of ultra-light deployable composite structures. This role sits at the intersection of design, analysis, and hands-on manufacturing — refining laminate schedules, developing new layup processes, designing tooling and fixtures, running experiments, and driving the factory-floor workflows that take a concept from CAD to flight hardware.

You will be responsible for improving yield, repeatability, and performance across all composite processes — curing, layup, machining, bonding, inspection, and structural validation — while collaborating closely with design engineering, test, and manufacturing. Your work directly determines the performance of composite structures headed to space.

Responsibilities
Own the engineering and process development for all in-house composite structures
Develop, validate, and optimize laminate schedules, cure cycles, and layup techniques
Design tooling, molds, fixtures, and inspection methods for thin high-precision composite parts
Run experiments to characterize materials and processes (fiber alignment, void fraction, cure kinetics, spring-in, etc.)
Implement manufacturing controls: travelers, process specs, inspection criteria, and QA workflows
Diagnose and resolve unusual composite manufacturing and structural issues
Collaborate with technicians to ensure manufacturability and performance alignment
Support fabrication on the floor — hands-on when needed — to bridge engineering and manufacturing
Drive continual improvement in surface quality, dimensional tolerance, repeatability, and yield
Support development and maintenance of capital equipment (ovens, autoclave alternatives, CNC routing for molds, etc.)

Ideal Qualifications
4–6 years of composites engineering experience spanning design, processing, and manufacturing
Strong background in composite materials engineering, aerospace structures, or manufacturing engineering
Experience designing and producing thin high-precision composite laminates (prepreg preferred)
Hands-on experience with composite processing: layup, cure, debulk, trimming, bonding, inspection
Experience developing tooling, mold design, or fixture design for composite components
Familiarity with structural analysis of composite parts (FEA, laminate theory, material allowables)
Experience setting or improving manufacturing processes, specs, and quality control methods
Comfort working in fast-paced R&D environments with rapid iteration
Experience with spacecraft, high-performance deployable structures, or other extreme-environment hardware is a bonus