The primes have a promotion problem, and it’s about to become your hiring advantage. In space, experience is hard to come by, but ability is everywhere. Plenty of engineers can already do the job. It’s just that their resume doesn’t say so yet. The answer to that gap: the step-up hire.
What Is a Step-Up Hire?
You’ve got a spot for a senior engineer. And somewhere inside a bigger company, with fewer opportunities, the engineer you need has been ready for a while. They’re the ones junior engineers go to for advice before anyone else. They’re doing jobs no one assigned to them, like running the subsystem review, or catching a design flaw before it ever reaches a senior engineer’s desk. The step-up hire is the person you might overlook for a role because “senior” is not in their job title yet. That’s the person you need to hire.
There Aren’t Enough Engineers to Begin With
There aren’t enough engineers in this industry to begin with, let alone senior engineers who’ve seen a program from requirements through operations. That’s only one of the reasons that 95% of space companies report skills-related recruitment or retention challenges.
The average recruitment cycle takes about 10 weeks. That’s 10 weeks of work lost to recruitment. The skills shortage shows up the most in propulsion, avionics, and flight software, the disciplines with the fewest people who’ve carried a full program end to end.
Why Engineers Are Leaving for Commercial Tech
And turnover isn’t helping either. The engineers don’t always leave because they’re frustrated where they are. The space industry is also competing for talent with the commercial tech industry for aerospace-trained engineers by offering them more money and faster progression.
The Primes’ Promotion Ceiling is Your Opportunity
Finding and retaining engineers for the space industry is about knowing what makes them tick. Progression is one thing most engineers are looking for at a certain point. Larger companies, especially the primes, can’t always offer engineers their next step once they’re ready. A team of five or six engineers might only have room for one of them to move up. That means most of these engineers will have to either stay put and try again next year or think of moving elsewhere.
A Senior at a Prime Isn’t a Senior at a Startup
In our experience, a senior at a prime is not the same as a senior at a startup. Primes and startups both have their own challenges and advantages, and no company is perfect. It just depends on what you’re looking for as an engineer.
Primes offer higher salaries and the career stability that startups can’t always promise. But there’s often a lot of red tape to deal with, and progression can be slow. A startup can offer a role that often doesn’t exist for engineers working inside a prime: hands-on technical leadership from day one, and a promotion timeline tied to how fast the company grows instead of how many seats are free in the org chart.
Management Track VS Staying Technical
Most engineers want responsibility and accountability. For ambitious engineers who love the tech, frustrations could start to build at the primes.
People management and staying technical are two different paths when it comes to larger space companies. At a prime, leading a team often means signing off on someone else’s test plan, instead of running the test bench yourself.
The Job Description Trap to Avoid
At EVONA, we often see founders responding to a difficult talent market by adding more things to the job description. The logic is something like “If the skills are hard to find, let me try to get more skills in one person”. Instead of helping, this costs you candidates.
The people who could fill your jobs are out there. They just might be waiting for their big break at a larger space company. This looks like standard engineers ready for senior, seniors ready for principal or lead.
How to Hire a Step-Up Candidate in Space Engineering
You might not be able to offer a prime salary but you can offer engineers something they won’t get at the primes: faster growth, while staying close to the tech they love. The step up is the offer.
The best way to approach this is to write the job description one level below where you’d naturally aim, and say so in the posting. In practice, that can mean rewriting the posting itself: describe the role as one for someone ready to become a Senior Systems Engineer, with the day-one expectations spelled out for the first two quarters.
Sell the Ownership
Your job description is your pitch to the engineers you’re interviewing. Instead of focusing on years of experience in the job, tell a candidate exactly what they’ll own in the first six months. Lead with the scope of the role, and not just the compensation, because ownership is the thing they won’t get by staying where they are.
Most founders already know they can’t outbid a prime on salary, but an offer isn’t only about money and the trimmings. It’s also about the opportunity to grow and the exposure to helping build a company – and the tech – from the ground up.
Don’t Forget to Screen for Culture
Screen for the transition instead of the years. Look for fast-paced or chaotic project work, side projects that show real interest in the industry, and evidence someone can operate without a structure telling them what to do next. Ten years at one company only matters if the instincts for a startup aren’t there too.
That step up works best with support around it. Pair the promotion with someone who’s done the role before, even if that’s a fractional advisor or a former colleague brought in for a few hours a month. The jump is real. It doesn’t have to be solo.
Every recruiter working the space market right now sees the same thing: strong candidates are getting multiple offers within days, not weeks. The founders who move first on the step-up pitch are the ones filling roles while everyone else is still waiting for a résumé that was never going to show up. The step-up candidates are already out there, waiting on a job description that actually speaks to them. See what EVONA can find for you.