About the role
About Cascade Space
Cascade Space is building ground-based physical infrastructure and software tools to support customer spacecraft exploring the moon and beyond. We recently raised a seed round and are excited to make our first mechanical engineering hire!
For our planned global network of ground stations, instead of building single large dishes, we are building arrays of dishes that are combined with a digital beamformer into one large aperture, comparable to a Deep Space Network 34 meter dish. Each array is ultimately a physical object with unique and challenging constraints — this is where you come in.
The Role
We are looking for a teammate who is excited to be a part of a tiny startup, ship real products made out of metal, and work on cool space stuff. You will have the opportunity to help build out the team, shape the cultural and engineering norms, and own a large part of our early success. We're building toward the future of spaceflight and human expansion into the solar system; wouldn't it be cool to help get that off the ground? Actually, the dish needs to stay bolted to the ground, that's an important part of your job.
While some of what makes the array possible is owned by dark wizards practicing arcane magic (RF and DSP engineers), the array is ultimately a physical object with unique and challenging constraints that must be met to enable the performance we need. This is where you come in.
You will own the mechanical integration of vendor-supplied dish systems with Cascade's in-house RF hardware — feeds, low-noise and high-power amplifiers, and associated electronics. You'll design mechanically stable, environmentally robust packaging for sensitive, ultra-low noise RF systems that need to survive harsh environmental conditions, and develop thermal management strategies.
You'll define the alignment strategies and tolerances that make or break array performance, and evaluate structural, thermal, and wind-loading effects on our pointing systems. You'll work closely with our RF and software teams to support calibration infrastructure, and develop the environmental, lifecycle, and field test plans that prove it all works long-term. And when it's time to stand up our first array, you'll be on-site helping deploy, install, and commission it.
