Author: Jones

Finding skilled talent is as much about what happens after the final interview as it is about finding the talent. When a hire takes longer than it should, it’s easy to doubt your recruiter or blame it on a lack of skilled talent. The brilliant candidates are out there – but is your sign-off process sending the right signal?

Why This Bottleneck Is Easy To Miss

From the inside, sign-off may not feel like an issue. You pay close attention to how long it takes for a shortlist to land in your inbox, and how fast a recruiter gets back to you with updates. You expect your recruiter to solve your hiring gaps. But it’s easy to forget that closing a candidate quickly is just as much your job as theirs. Too often, we’ve seen hiring managers delay feedback or sign-off, only to miss the exact candidate they needed for the role.

These Founders Find Talent Fast

This isn’t one recruiter’s opinion. Across searches spanning cleared defense roles to early-stage software teams, we’ve seen the same thing. Long processes, slow feedback, and roles that stall mid-search for weeks at a time are the top reasons a hire drags on, and founders are often unaware of the role they play in hiring delays. 

The clients who access the best talent quickly do two things. They provide feedback quickly, and they do it well. A one-word response like “pass” or “not quite” doesn’t tell a recruiter how to adjust their search for the next round. “Liked their systems background, want to see more hands-on testing experience” is great, because the recruiter can go find exactly that instead. Speed without detail still stalls things. 

The Search is The Easy Part if You Know What You’re Looking For

You might expect finding niche talent to be the biggest bottleneck in recruiting for space companies. But often, the paperwork is the problem. All you need is a well-scoped job description and a recruiter who knows what to look for. At EVONA, a strong shortlist comes together quickly, often within the first week.

But the main thing that stops a great hire from happening is slow sign-off. This looks like the paperwork sitting on a hiring manager’s desk while the candidate continues interviewing elsewhere. A role that goes unattended for a few weeks does the same damage. 

The Cost of Slow Sign-Off 

Because candidates don’t have insight into your schedule, they experience your lack of speed as a sign that you’re not interested, and they move on. A fast reply reads as genuine interest. In one case, EVONA filled a software engineering job in 9 days, with only the offer outstanding. The client’s own sign-off then took another 21 to 22 days, more than twice as long as the search itself. 

In specialities where the shortlist is genuinely small, like propulsion, avionics and RF, delaying sign-off could mean losing the one candidate you liked. That means starting from scratch again. Strong candidates don’t wait for you to approve their offer. The company that responds fastest is very often the one that wants to hire the most.

What Your Fastest-Closing Competitors Do Differently

At seed and Series A, solid hiring processes go a long way in securing the right candidates. You can create a sign-off process candidates will say yes to. That means deciding in advance who reviews the shortlist, and committing to a feedback turnaround before the search starts. 

And fewer people in the loop means fewer places for a decision to get stuck. The clients who hire fastest are the ones where the CEO or CTO reviews the shortlist directly, instead of a hiring manager whose plate is too full. 

This doesn’t mean you have to rush a decision. First, it’s important to draft a clear job description. It also means deciding, before the search starts, how fast you’ll move once the right person is in front of you. The space talent market isn’t getting any less competitive. One thing you do have control over is how long you take to say yes.

Most Series A space founders treat their hiring plan as a later problem. Something to sort out once there’s enough headcount to justify it. It’s understandable. Getting the technology right comes first. Investor confidence is everything, and that means things like a competitive satellite bus, a propulsion system that actually works, a payload that holds up under review.

If you’re scaling on purpose, you need a plan for what happens after the tech gets funded. Everything about the business should be deliberate, and that includes how you hire and retain talent.

Every founder at this stage faces the same tension: hire the technical talent that helps you build the engine, or hire the operational engine that helps you bring those people in and keep them?

Get this right, and the engineers you spent months recruiting become the team that backs you to get to Series B. The tricky part is there’s no blueprint that says when it’s time to start building your hiring team. That’s what this blog post will help you figure out.

Your Hiring Function at Seed vs. Series A

At Seed stage, you’re the one setting the baseline. That means how hiring gets done, what the company stands for, and how the technology you’re building will change the space industry and the world beyond it. These are the things that will attract and keep the technical talent you need to scale. 

But when scaling becomes the priority, founders often hire fast on the technical side, and never hand off the culture work they started to anyone who can keep it going. Some of the startups we work with have their first hiring lead in place before they’ve even reached Series A, and this isn’t necessarily a mistake. 

Once you start scaling, there’s no time to think about how to welcome a hire on their first day, or how an interview should be run as standard practice. That’s the best case: getting this in place before Series A. What that looks like in practice is up to you.

What Do You Need Right Now?

Deciding when to bring on dedicated hiring support will look different for everyone. Here are two things to consider: how aggressive your growth plan is, and what you bring to the table as a founder. 

A more operational, almost COO-style founder could hold on longer without it. But if you’re technical and you’ve never run onboarding at scale, you need that support early.

Depending on your runway and how aggressively you’re hiring, you could consider fractional hiring support. This is usually a part-time generalist, brought in as a three-to-four-month bridge, with a view of actually bringing them on full time.

How Do You Hire Competitively as a Space Startup?

By Series A, most founders have already sat on the other side of the hiring table. Interviewing candidates isn’t new to them.

Founders know their own business inside and out. It’s what helps them sell the mission to the next engineering hire. But the hiring market? That’s a different story.

Do you know which company just poached three propulsion engineers from a competitor? Which skill set went from available to impossible in six months? Your talent partner can tell you. A specialist talent partner closes that gap. They’re embedded in the space industry and talk to the people building it daily. Knowing what’s happening in the market isn’t extra effort. It’s the whole job. That frees founders up to focus on building their business.

Armed with this knowledge, your talent partner can:

• Shape the interview process itself
• Provide real data on time-to-hire and salary benchmarks
• Advise on equity structures
• Sit with your hiring managers to define what the culture needs to look like
• Screen candidates for cultural fit before they ever reach an interview

The Takeaway

Before Series A, hiring support tends to be informal or nonexistent, and you’re doing the culture-setting work by default, whether or not you call it that. After Series A, the real choice isn’t whether that function gets built. It’s whether you’re putting it to work to help build your company on purpose.

The interview process at SpaceX is notoriously demanding. We’re talking multiple rounds, stretched across five to eight weeks, by design. It’s not a template to copy, but a lesson to learn: build a hiring structure that’s yours, on purpose, instead of leaving it to chance.

Whether you’re looking at Long Beach or Hawthorne, relocating for a space role can be career-defining. But this is different from your typical career move: in most industries, you can take a new job without moving. In space, you often can’t.

Why Relocation Is So Common in the Space Industry

More than 80% of the roles we place at EVONA require some on-site work (44% hybrid, 38% on-site). And for electrical engineers, it’s more than 90%. Clearance-required work can’t be done remotely. By definition, no amount of Wi-Fi gets you into a security cleared role. And a lot of hardware work simply has to happen where the hardware is. You can’t test a rocket engine from your kitchen table.

This reality plays out in two common ways. Switch to a competitor with no presence in your city, and you’ll need to move. An engineer at Lockheed Martin in Denver taking a role at Blue Origin in Kent (Washington) doesn’t have a remote option. Get promoted or transferred within a large prime like Boeing or Northrop Grumman, and you might be relocated to a different program site. Whether you were thinking about it or not.

So this isn’t a hypothetical exercise. If you’re in this industry long enough, the relocation conversation will probably come up. In this blog, we’ll tell you how to have it properly. To do that, here’s a list of things to work through before an offer lands, so you can say “yes” or “no” with a straight face.

Is Your Spouse on Board, Really?

First things first. Before saying yes to an interview, have a real talk with your spouse. What will this move do to your relationship, your family, lifestyle and both of your careers? If you have a spouse and kids to consider, a move like this is a family decision rather than a solo one.

Can your partner do their job from there? Push past the polite yes. Does their industry even exist in that city? If your partner’s a marine biologist and you’re moving to Nebraska, “open to it” and “this works” are not the same sentence.

Ask the hard questions early. The candidates who make it through an interview process without doubts research everything, and don’t say yes until both partners are sure. We’ve seen this play out in two ways. In one case, a candidate moved from Vancouver to Toronto. His wife’s company had its headquarters there, so it was a straightforward move for both. On the flipside, another candidate’s wife had already started from scratch after a previous move didn’t work out, when his company folded.

And don’t forget your support network. Have you thought about who’s nearby that you’d actually call at 2am? Do you know anyone in the city you’re moving to? “We’ll make new friends” might be true, but it’s not a plan.

The Price of Bread: A Cost of Living Check

Here’s a quick test: what does a loaf of bread cost in your new city? If you don’t know, you’re not ready to negotiate salary yet. A bigger number on the offer letter means nothing if you haven’t figured out the cost of living. A move from Colorado to California on the “same” salary isn’t a lateral move, it’s a pay cut. Check the rent and you’ll see it immediately. Moving countries adds another layer: US dollars into Canadian dollars looks like a raise until you figure out what a CAD actually buys you.

Run the numbers regardless: 10 to 20 percent ahead of your current spending power, cost of living priced in, is a reasonable bar for a real raise rather than a lateral move. But pay isn’t the only reason to take a role like this. If you’re moving for the mission, the technology, or a company with real momentum, that’s a legitimate trade, as long as you’re making it with your eyes open. Know whether you’re taking a pay cut, and decide honestly if it’s one you’re willing to make.

Go Straight to the Source: Checking a Startup’s Runway

Considering the effort it takes to move, relocating for an early-stage company means you need to commit to their mission ideally for the next 5 years. With a family to consider, you need to know whether the funding will last long enough for you to build a life in a new city.

This isn’t a decision you make off a mission statement. A recruiter can tell you about the role, but only the founder can tell you how much runway is actually left. And if you can’t get a straight answer on funding, that’s a red flag. Ask directly for the number, and don’t accept “we’re in a great position.”

Timing Your Move: Schools, Housing and Notice Periods

Have kids mid-school-year? That’s not a footnote, that’s a reason to push your start date. Pulling a kid out of a school they’re happy in is much harder in February than it might be in June.

If you own a house, are you selling it before or after the move? If you’re renting, what notice do you owe your landlord? Does it line up with your start date, or are you about to double up on a rent payment?

Successful Moves Have This in Common

The moves that don’t work out usually involve: a partner’s hesitation, an aging parent you haven’t considered, a child midway through a school year. And you can’t solve any of these on a Zoom call.

None of this is an argument against relocating. We relocate people into career-defining moves all the time. The difference is that couples that start the conversation on day one give themselves the best chance for success. That means researching schools, neighborhoods, and grocery prices before there’s an offer on the table, not after.

The Move Might Be Risky, but Is It Worth It?

Not every relocation is about managing risk. The real question is whether that risk is worth saying yes to. Space is still an early industry. New companies are attracting real funding and building toward a five-to-ten-year horizon that didn’t exist a decade ago. If you’re at a large company today with a role that’s stalled, little say in what you work on next, and no real path upward, a company with a genuine plan for your career can be worth the move on its own.

Maybe compensation isn’t the real draw. Maybe it’s the technology. The chance to work closer to leadership. To put your name on something that will actually orbit. To work on a problem most companies aren’t touching yet. If you believe in the mission and the role enough, that’s a real reason to move too, even when the numbers don’t quite add up yet.

On June 30, 2026, NASA awarded a $600 million deal to three companies to build the next generation of robotic Moon landers. It’s one piece of their plan for a permanent Moon Base, continuously crewed by 2032. While doing something ground-breaking, this deal is betting on the availability of critically low space manufacturing talent. Companies involved will need to answer this question: “is there enough space manufacturing talent to actually build this?”

Who Got What: the Breakdown

Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines have been tasked with delivering four landers between them, due on the lunar surface by late 2028:

• Astrobotic takes $297.9 million, for two lunar deliveries
• Firefly gets $144.2 million, for one delivery
• Intuitive Machines gets $148.3 million, also for one delivery

Altogether, the deal is worth close to $600 million, awarded through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, as part of its wider Moon Base effort.

Things get really interesting when looking closely at that split. More than half of Intuitive Machines’ award ($79.7 million of the $148.3 million) has nothing to do with landing successfully on the Moon. It’s a performance incentive tied to proving the company can build the same lander again, on a production line.

What This Means for Space Manufacturing Talent

Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said that NASA is “shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure.”

Building one hand-built lander takes a small group of elite design engineers who can solve a problem once. Building the same lander over and over takes a different organization, and a different set of people to run it.

Three Companies Now Need:

• Production and manufacturing engineers, to design the assembly line rather than just the lander
• Assembly technicians, who can replicate the same standard every time
• Supply chain specialists, who can source parts at volume
• Quality and reliability engineers, because doing it once is no longer the objective

These aren’t new roles in aerospace. What’s new is the scale of hiring required. Nobody’s built at this volume before, so the people who know how are clustered in just two places: SpaceX’s Starlink line, and Airbus’s OneWeb facility. Three companies are now chasing that same small group of engineers, and there aren’t enough of them to go around. That’s why the more realistic hires might come from automotive and consumer electronics, instead of aerospace companies.

NASA’s Commercial Space Strategy Catches Up to Satellites

The industry has gone from reusing a rocket booster, to reusing 85 percent of a rover’s hardware, to now paying a company just to prove it can build the same lander twice. The shift we’re seeing in the production of landers, is something we’ve seen before with satellites. Airbus and OneWeb proved that satellites can be mass-produced way back in 2019, and Starlink pushed the idea further still. 

Their Florida facility ran two production lines, turning out two satellites a day. A custom satellite used to take over a year to build, and cost tens of millions. 

A satellite that fails just gets swapped out on the next launch, one machine among thousands. A lander doesn’t get that luxury. NASA’s deal covers four landers, not four thousand, and each one has to work the first time.

What NASA’s Money Can’t Buy: Space Manufacturing Talent

Money buys parts, tooling, and facilities. It doesn’t buy an assembly technician who already knows how flight hardware differs from anything else they’ve built, or a supply chain lead who understands what happens when one connector supplier misses a date. Those people exist in small numbers, and they aren’t waiting to be found.

NASA can fund the shift to mass production, but it can’t fully control how it plays out. The outcome depends on three companies succeeding at something none of them has done before, all while competing for the same scarce production talent, on the same deadline.

NASA has made the funding available to build landers on repeat. Whether Astrobotic, Firefly, or Intuitive Machines pull it off will come down to who finds the right people first.

A counteroffer can’t undo the eighteen months that led to a resignation, but it can make an inevitable departure more expensive. Retaining aerospace engineers starts long before an engineer even considers resigning. A recent AIA–McKinsey workforce study found that aerospace and defense companies continue to face “industry‑wide attrition… at nearly 15 percent,”, more than double the U.S. industry average.

It’s the same instinct almost every time. One of your best engineers hands in their notice, and you do what any manager in your shoes would: find out what it would take, then match it.

You offer more money, maybe a new title, and they say yes. Six months later, sometimes less, they’re gone anyway. 

Should You Counteroffer an Employee Who Resigned? 

By the time you’re making a counteroffer, an engineer has often already done the hard part. They’ve decided to leave. They may already have an offer in hand. 

Asking them to undo all of that for a higher number is asking a lot. The engineers who accept counteroffers are often the ones who are still weighing their options. The result of a counteroffer is that you’re now paying above market for someone who has already mentally checked out.

To retain an aerospace engineer, the better question to ask is not “What can I offer to make them stay?” but “What happened that made them want to leave?”

Spot Signs of Disengagement Before They Hand in Their Notice 

As a manager, it’s important to look out for signs of disengagement. An engineer who used to push for more responsibility might stop volunteering for new work. Someone who is usually engaged becomes quieter in meetings. Conversations about the future become less frequent, or disappear completely.

Money matters, but it’s rarely the answer to a resignation. What space engineers care about is often less about salary reviews and more about whether they still see a future at the company, trust their manager, and feel connected to the work they were hired to do.

Reasons Engineers Quit: We Hear These All the Time 

It’s worth understanding why space companies lose engineers, because the resignation is often the result of problems that have been compounding for months.

Career and Growth Stagnation 

Sometimes the next step simply doesn’t exist yet. At a smaller space company, an ambitious engineer can find themselves doing senior-level work with no obvious path forward, while peers elsewhere are taking on bigger technical challenges or moving into leadership roles.

Mission or Program Mismatch 

Many engineers join because they believe in a mission. When that mission changes or gets delayed, the job they’re in can start to feel very different from the one they accepted.

Management and Leadership Friction 

Engineers rarely leave because of one bad day. More often, trust erodes slowly through missed promises, changing priorities, or a manager who makes it harder to do good work. By the time someone resigns, that frustration has usually been ongoing for a while.

Pace and Visibility of Progress 

Space programs can take years to reach major milestones. When progress feels slow and contributions go unnoticed, even highly engaged engineers can start looking elsewhere, for a place where they can have a more visible impact.

Autonomy and Trust 

Most experienced engineers want ownership. When every decision is second-guessed or too much time is spent navigating the process instead of solving problems, frustration tends to build quickly.

Compensation Structure 

Money matters, but it is not always the real issue. Often the problem is that an engineer’s responsibilities have grown while their compensation, equity, or recognition has stayed exactly the same.

External Pull Factors 

Space engineers know they have options. The moment they start taking recruiter calls, they are exposed to opportunities, locations, missions, and career paths they had not previously considered.

Burnout and Personal Capacity 

Launch campaigns, test windows, and critical milestones can demand a lot from people. Most engineers can handle periods of intensity. When the intensity becomes the norm rather than the exception, other offers might start to look more attractive.

Why Retention Got Harder in the Last Two Years 

Engineers have always had moments of doubt about growth, mission, or management. A few years ago, a frustrated engineer may have stayed anyway. There were only so many companies building serious hardware, and moving was a real gamble. 

But things have started changing. Capital is flooding into the sector, with new companies launching constantly, and almost all of them are hiring for the same skill sets. 

At the same time, space is becoming mainstream. The work is more visible, the salaries are more competitive, and employers are shaping their brands to appeal to the engineers they need. The engineer who used to feel stuck has far more options now than before. 

Instead of a Counteroffer, Do This 

A counteroffer is trying, too late, to compensate for the reasons an engineer has been unsatisfied in a role. The solution lies less in having a retention plan and more in paying attention from day one. Here are some things to consider as a manager in the space industry:

• Make sure you are having the growth conversation before someone assumes their role is going nowhere
• Be honest about changes to the mission and project timelines
• Make sure an engineer’s compensation and recognition keep pace with what’s expected of them, and not what they were hired to do two years ago.

None of these things will save every departure. For some people, it’s time to leave, and no amount of attention will change that. But paying attention can change how an engineer feels about their role while they’re still in it.

A counteroffer can only respond to a resignation. The companies that retain their best engineers are not the ones writing the biggest checks at the end. They are the ones paying attention from the start.

A five-month-old company with six employees just filed with the FCC to launch 100,000 satellites.

Not communication satellites, not Earth observation satellites, but data centers in orbit. The space hiring it triggers touches a talent pool the sector has never tapped before.

Orbital, based in Los Angeles, wants to put 10 gigawatts of computing power in space – roughly the same amount of new electricity capacity the entire US power grid added last year. The satellites would be 100-kilowatt class, sitting in low Earth orbit between 500 and 850 kilometers, with solar arrays and radiators spanning about 100 meters each.

The plan is early, and Orbital has $5 million in pre-seed funding, a team of six people from SpaceX, Amazon, and Northrop Grumman, and a demo mission planned for next year with a single GPU. The first real compute satellite isn’t expected until 2028. The full constellation is into the next decade.

But Orbital isn’t the only story. It’s the latest signal in a pattern that’s been building all year – and that pattern is about to change who space companies are hiring in 2026 and beyond.

Who’s Building Orbital Data Centers in 2026

Orbital’s filing landed three weeks after the company came out of stealth. It joins a growing list of companies betting that the future of AI computing isn’t in a warehouse in Virginia – it’s in orbit.

SpaceX filed with the FCC in January for up to one million orbital data center satellites. That filing came days after the SpaceX-xAI merger and fits into a broader strategy that includes the $1.75 trillion IPO. SpaceX’s S-1 showed its AI segment burning $7.7 billion in capital expenditure in Q1 alone, and the company has said it plans to deploy data centers in space as early as 2028.

Starcloud has proposed an 88,000-satellite constellation with 200-kilowatt-class spacecraft. Cowboy Space has filed its own orbital compute plans. Even Vast – the station company that recently expanded into satellite buses – is offering an optional NVIDIA AI compute module on its platform.

The thesis behind all of them is the same: AI is eating more power than the ground can provide. Data centers need electricity, cooling, and land, and all three are running short. Space has constant sunlight for power, the vacuum of space for cooling, and no neighbors to complain about noise or water usage.

Whether 100,000 or a million orbital data centers actually get built is a question for the next decade. But the investment is moving now, and the AI jobs in space it creates are already being filled.

The New Engineering Roles Orbital Data Centers Are Creating

Here’s why this matters for anyone thinking about where space careers are heading.

Every other trend we’ve covered this year – Artemis, Golden Dome, the Space Force budget, commercial constellations – creates demand for traditional space engineers. Systems engineers, GNC specialists, propulsion engineers, flight software developers – the people who’ve always built spacecraft.

Orbital data centers are different. They need those people too – someone has to build the satellite bus, design the power systems, manage the thermal environment in orbit. But they also need an entirely new category of talent that the space sector has never recruited before.

Data center architects who understand how to design computing infrastructure at scale.

The people who’ve spent their careers at AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Meta designing the cooling systems, power distribution, and rack layouts for terrestrial server farms. Their knowledge of thermal management, power efficiency, and high-density computing translates directly to the orbital problem – the physics are different, but the engineering principles are the same.

GPU and chip-level engineers who understand how processors perform under extreme conditions.

Space adds radiation, vacuum, and thermal cycling to the engineering challenge. Nvidia’s involvement (through partnerships with Vast and others) signals that the GPU expertise currently concentrated in Silicon Valley is about to become relevant to space for the first time.

Optical networking specialists who can build the communication links between satellites and between orbit and the ground.

Orbital’s plan – like SpaceX’s and Starcloud’s – relies on optical inter-satellite links to move data between the compute nodes and back to Earth. The engineers who build these links are currently working in telecom and fiber optics. Space needs them.

Power systems engineers at a scale the space sector hasn’t seen.

A 100-kilowatt satellite is roughly ten times the power of a typical commercial communications satellite. Designing, deploying, and managing solar arrays and power distribution at that level is a different engineering problem than what most spacecraft power engineers have worked on.

This is a discipline convergence. Two talent pools – space hardware and terrestrial computing infrastructure -that have never overlapped are about to merge. The engineers at hyperscalers who’ve never considered a space career are suddenly relevant. And the space engineers who’ve never thought about data center architecture are about to need that vocabulary. For software engineers wondering how to get into the space industry, this may be the most accessible entry point yet.

Orbital Data Center Timeline: What’s Funded and What’s Still Speculative

Let’s be clear about timelines. Orbital has six people and $5 million. Their first GPU demo is next year, and full-scale deployment is years away. Even SpaceX’s million-satellite filing is aspirational at this point – the technology for orbital computing at that scale doesn’t fully exist yet.

But the hiring doesn’t wait for the technology to be ready. SpaceX is already building toward orbital compute through its xAI integration. Vast is offering AI modules on its satellite bus. The defense sector is investing billions in space-based data processing through programs like Golden Dome and the Space Force’s AI command-and-control experiments.

The companies that will lead orbital computing in 2030 are hiring the founding teams now. And those teams are being built from a talent pool that didn’t exist as a category twelve months ago.

What This Means for Space Careers

The space sector has always hired rocket scientists, satellite engineers, and mission operators. That’s not changing. But the orbital data center race is adding a new layer of demand – for engineers who understand computing infrastructure, thermal management at scale, GPU performance, and optical networking.

For the first time, a career at Google’s data center division or Meta’s infrastructure team is directly relevant experience for a space company. That’s a shift the sector hasn’t seen before, and it’s going to reshape who space companies recruit, where they recruit from, and what a “space career” looks like for the next generation of engineers.

The newest job in space isn’t building rockets. It’s building the servers that fly on them.