Senior - Telescope Systems Lead Engineer

About Cosmic Frontier

Cosmic Frontier’s mission is to dramatically expand access to high-performance space telescopes, democratize the scientific process, and build tools for exploring the Universe.

Our team owns the full lifecycle of spaceflight hardware and software—from early architecture through flight. We build and fly real hardware, and the systems you design will go to orbit within the next two years.

Is this the next step in your career Find out if you are the right candidate by reading through the complete overview below.

Role Description

We’re hiring an experienced Telescope Systems Engineer to own the end-to-end architecture of our Telescope Assembly and keep the system technically coherent as designs evolve.

This is a high-judgment, high-accountability role. You’ll make hard tradeoffs, keep performance budgets honest, and drive cross-discipline decisions to closure. You’ll spend real time with hardware—closing the loop between analysis, integration, and test—and you’ll be measured by whether the telescope works, not by the thickness of the documentation.

You will serve as the technical backbone of the Telescope Assembly and ensure it meets required optical and pointing performance under realistic flight conditions (thermal, jitter, loads, and operations).

What You’ll Do

• Own telescope assembly performance end-to-end as the Cognizant Engineer, including optical performance, stability, and system-level behavior.
• Drive decisions across disciplines (optics, optomechanical/structures, thermal, avionics/electronics, controls, firmware, software). Maintain the minimum set of requirements and interface definitions needed to move fast without breaking things.
• Build and maintain system performance budgets with explicit margin policy and change control, including:
• Optical performance (e.g., WFE, PSF, EE,