Category: Hiring Execution

At the Seed stage, your pitch deck was your product, and your passion was your sales strategy. You wore every hat because you had to. But you’ve just closed your Series A, and the game has fundamentally changed. You’re no longer just building a cool engineering project; you’re building a commercial engine. And that means making your first sales hire.

If you remain the primary salesperson for your company, you will become the single biggest bottleneck to your own growth. The question isn’t whether you need help. It’s how to hire someone who can carry the torch without burning the house down.

That’s why the first role we see founders hire for is an experienced business development lead. It’s a good move. But, as with most hires, the devil is in the details.

What Your First Sales Hire at Series A Should Look Like:

Building a sales function is how you create a steady pipeline and a predictable revenue stream. The key is setting your first hire up to succeed. It’s easy to be impressed by years of experience and big industry names. But you can end up hiring someone who isn’t up for the challenges a startup like yours will face. In our experience, two things are more important than the resume:

Scrappiness Over Seniority & Government Expertise

Most space companies want the safety of government contracts. So founders often aim high, hiring a BD director or VP from a large company who knows federal compliance inside out. On paper, this makes sense, but the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to space startups.

If you hire for regulatory know-how alone, you could end up with someone who understands the process but can’t build you a pipeline. Navigating government bureaucracy isn’t the same skill as hunting for new business. And someone used to a team, bid writers, and a recognizable brand will struggle without that infrastructure.

You need someone with tenacity, some government exposure, and enough technical understanding to be taken seriously. A lot of early deals closed because you could talk to prospects engineer to engineer, and your first sales hire needs to do the same while building the sales function from scratch. Pair that with strong commercial instinct and enough government understanding to navigate the process, and you’ve got yourself a winning sales hire.

As Index Ventures put it in their startup handbook Scaling Through Chaos, “grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.”

Grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.

Startup Instinct Over a SaaS or Prime Resume

Founders tend to hire from one of two pools: aerospace primes, or fast-growth consumer tech. Both of these come with their own problems. Someone from a consumer-tech company is used to things moving quickly. Space doesn’t work like that. Everything takes longer. Parts show up late, and you can’t rush things. Someone from a prime has the opposite problem: all red tape, and no startup instinct. What you want is someone in between, who knows the tech but can still build from scratch. When you’re sizing up a track record, don’t take their word for it. Ask your talent partner to verify it by checking publicly available company records. Contract wins in space are announced publicly, so it’s easy to confirm who’s actually closed deals.

Your First Sales Hire in Practice: A SpaceX Example

In our experience, the best sales people in a startup often come from a technical background. In 2002, Gwynne Shotwell was the 11th person hired into the company, joining as VP of Business Development. She trained as an engineer, but she could also sell. She went on to become President and COO. Her combination of technical credibility and commercial instinct is what you should be aiming for. But the commercial hire you need is often more junior than you’d expect because the right person will grow with you and mold to your evolving culture.

How to Hire and Retain Your First Sales Role

The mission is not enough. Don’t forget to sell the opportunity. Remember that this talent is in high demand, so you are in the hot seat too. The mission helps, but it takes more than that to win someone over. It’s worth treating the hiring process as a sales process in its own right.

Define the Function Before the Title

Before you start selling the opportunity, it’s important to be clear about what the role needs to do. Generating pipeline, closing enterprise contracts, building go-to-market from scratch, managing government relationships… each of these will require a different kind of person. A job description that’s not clear can cost you months of runway and wasted money.

Move Quickly

In this market, speed is everything. Founder-led searches for senior roles tend to drag on for months and eat up time you don’t have, and the best people won’t wait around. That’s why working with a specialist with access to the talent you need is crucial to securing the best sales hires in space.

Offer a Competitive Package

Think about what you can offer. You can’t promise a large commission plan yet, so lean on what a startup does have. Most of the startups we work with lead with equity and stock options, flexibility, and the chance to build and own a sales function from the ground up. For the right person, the opportunity to shape the department is the real draw.

Give Your Sales Person Enough Time

Finally, don’t expect traction overnight. The person you hire is building your sales function from scratch, with no playbook. That takes time, and space makes it slower still, because government sales cycles are long and relationships are built over months, not weeks. Hire someone used to scaling what already exists, and you’ll both get frustrated quickly.

The Takeaway

Your first commercial hire isn’t about finding the most impressive name on paper. It’s about hiring for the company you are today, and the person who can build what you need next. One of the greatest advantages of partnering with a specialized talent firm is that they look at the macro-dynamics of the entire market, not just the passive stack of resumes sitting in your applicant tracking system.

They can immediately help you differentiate between a genuine talent shortage and an over-scoped JD that is simply asking for the impossible. Get crystal clear on the outcomes you need to achieve first. Once you do, the ideal hire becomes impossible to miss.

A hiring process can do everything right and still lose. The role gets scoped well, the search runs clean, the right engineer comes through, the interviews go well, everyone agrees this is the one. And then the offer takes weeks to sign off, and the candidate is gone.

It is one of the most avoidable ways to lose a hire, and in the current market, it is happening more, not less.

The offer stage is where speed matters most, and where companies slow down most

Most hiring processes speed up where it’s easy and slow down where it counts. The early stages move quickly because they are easy. Posting the role, screening, first interviews, all of it has momentum because nothing is at stake yet. Then, when a strong candidate emerges and the decision actually matters, the process slows to a crawl exactly when it should accelerate.

The sign-off is where it stalls. The hiring manager is ready, but the offer needs finance to confirm the band, a founder to approve the equity, and sometimes a parent company in another timezone to sign. Each step is reasonable on its own, but together they can turn into days, sometimes weeks, worth of back and forth.

The company knows this to be diligence, but the candidate just sees it as silence.

A good candidate in space is not waiting for you

The engineer you want is not sitting at home hoping you call back. In the space sector right now, a strong systems engineer or GNC lead is in two or three other processes at the same time, because every company is hiring, and the qualified pool is small. They have options, and the options are moving.

So a multi-week gap is not neutral time – it’s time during which someone else closes them. While you are routing the offer for internal approval, a competitor who can sign in 48 hours has already made theirs. The candidate doesn’t even have to ‘prefer’ the other company – they just have to get a real offer in hand before yours arrives, and the decision often gets made for you.

This compounds with something we have written about elsewhere: candidate attention is the scarce resource in this market. It is hard enough to get a strong engineer to engage at all. Having earned that, losing them to your own internal timeline is a self-inflicted wound.

“On hold” is not the safe option it looks like

There is a slower version of the same mistake. A role gets to final stage, a good candidate is ready, and then the company puts the search on hold. Budget needs reconfirming, priorities are shifting, leadership wants to wait a quarter. Pausing feels cautious, like preserving optionality until the picture is clearer.

It does the opposite because the candidate at final stage does not pause with you. They take another offer, and the relationship cools. When the role reopens a few months later, the person you wanted is placed elsewhere, and the pipeline you built has dispersed.

Pausing doesn’t always protect your options, but it can remove them. The only way to keep a candidate as an option is to decide while they’re still available.

What this actually asks of a company

The fix is not to rush the decision or lower the bar; it’s to make sure the parts of the process that have nothing to do with candidate quality are not the parts that cost you the candidate.

That means knowing your salary bands before you open the search, not negotiating them after the final interview. It means having equity sign-off authority sit with someone who is actually in the process, or at least reachable inside a candidate’s decision window. It means treating an offer for a strong candidate as the urgent thing it is, rather than one more item in an approval queue.

This requires seeing the offer stage for what it is. It is not the formality at the end of the search – it is the search. Everything before it only earns you the right to move fast when it counts.

For most of 2025, the question hanging over NASA was how deep the cuts would go. The administration’s budget request proposed slashing the agency’s funding by nearly a quarter and its workforce by roughly a third. Then, in January 2026, Congress did something close to a full reversal – passing a $24.4 billion budget that rejected almost all of the proposed reductions and kept NASA funded at close to the prior year.

On paper, that looks like a story with a happy ending and no hiring consequence, but it isn’t. By the time the budget was restored, a great deal had already happened to the workforce – and the people who left aren’t coming back just because the funding did.

The people left before the money came back.

While the funding fight played out, more than 3,800 NASA employees had already taken voluntary exits (deferred-resignation offers, early retirements, separation incentives) with the agency’s headcount projected to fall toward 14,000 in early 2026. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab ran a round of involuntary layoffs on top of that and ended remote work for thousands.

Those exits are the key, because they are permanent in a way the budget never was. A funding cut can be proposed one year and reversed the next – and that is exactly what happened. But a retirement cannot be un-signed. When an experienced engineer accepted a package in late 2025, they left the agency for good; the January budget reversal protected the missions and programs they used to work on, but it did nothing to bring that person back. The money returned, but the people who had already walked did not.

So the workforce drawdown is real and largely irreversible, even though the budget cut that supposedly caused it mostly didn’t happen. And the uncertainty hasn’t fully closed either: the FY2027 request released in April has reopened the same questions, proposing another deep science cut. For a slice of NASA’s experienced workforce, two years of not knowing has been reason enough to move.

Why this pool is hidden.

A company hiring senior space talent tends to look where availability is visible: candidates marked “open to work,” active applicants, people who respond to outreach. That filter misses this pool almost entirely.

The people who left NASA through voluntary programs did not get laid off – they took a considered package and stepped out on their own terms, often with no urgency to look for a new position. They aren’t refreshing job boards and lots of them aren’t “looking” at all. What they are doing is weighing what is next while the financial pressure to decide quickly simply isn’t there. By every signal a standard search relies on, they look unavailable. But actually, they are some of the most movable senior people in the market right now, because the thing anchoring them to a long government career has loosened.

This is the same pattern our delivery team sees in the most specialised corners of space engineering: the strongest candidates are almost never the ones raising their hands. They are sourced, not applied. The best computational and systems people in this sector rarely appear on a job board, because they are employed, capable, and not actively searching – which is precisely what makes them worth reaching. The post-NASA pool is a large, suddenly-formed version of exactly that dynamic.

The seniority is the second half of the story.

It is not only that this pool is hidden, it’s also who’s in it. Voluntary exit programs and early retirements skew toward experienced people – the engineers and program leaders with enough tenure to have the option, enough behind them to weigh it seriously, and enough seniority that they are normally almost impossible to pry loose from a stable government post. That profile is the hardest thing to hire in the commercial space sector: people who have run real programs, navigated mission assurance, and operated in environments where failure has real consequences.

In an ordinary year, a growth-stage space company has little chance of moving someone with twenty years inside a NASA center. The career incentives all point the other way. What changed is not that these people suddenly became reachable through normal channels; it is that a meaningful number of them have already stepped outside the institution and are deciding what to do with the next decade. The window where they are both available and not yet committed is open, and it is not permanent.

What this means for how you hire.

The instinct, reading “NASA workforce shrinking,” is to wait for the resumes to arrive, but they mostly won’t – not from the people you actually want. This pool does not surface through inbound – it has to be mapped and approached directly. It required an understanding of what these candidates are weighing up as it’s not a desperate move after a layoff, but a deliberate decision about whether commercial space is where their experience matters most.

That also shapes the pitch. Someone who chose to leave a mission they cared about is not motivated by the same things as someone escaping a bad situation. They are asking whether the work is real, whether their experience will be used rather than diluted, and whether the company actually ships. Companies that approach this pool as if it were a flood of available labour will misread it. The ones that treat it as a group of experienced people making a considered choice (and reach them before they commit elsewhere) will hire engineers they could not have touched eighteen months ago.

For companies building in commercial space, this gap is one of the most interesting talent openings of the year – if you know it’s there.

Ask almost any space company why hiring is hard right now and you’ll hear the same phrase: talent shortage.

• There aren’t enough engineers.
• The pipeline is too thin.
• The good people are all taken.

Our findings tell a different story. The constraint isn’t just supply. It’s attention.

Capital arrived. The roles multiplied. The people didn’t.

The money flowing into space is not a vague trend. Seraphim Space recorded $7.95 billion invested in the first quarter of 2026, with average deal sizes roughly doubling from $35 million to $68 million. Two of the largest gravitational forces in the sector are pulling at once. SpaceX filed confidentially for what could be one of the largest IPOs in US history, with a roadshow reported for early June. And the Golden Dome missile-defense program has begun moving real money into the market – the Space Force has awarded around $3.2 billion across twenty contracts to a dozen companies to build space-based interceptors, inside a program scoped well past $175 billion.

Each of those events does the same thing to the staffing market. It opens roles – fast and concentrated in the same disciplines and the same seniority bands. The capital didn’t ease the hiring market, it flooded it with demand.

What it could not do is manufacture more people who can do the work. The number of engineers who can design a space-based interceptor payload, or stand up a satellite manufacturing line, or lead a flight-software team through a launch campaign, did not change because the funding did. So the sector now has far more open roles chasing the same finite group of qualified candidates.

The real scarce resource is a returned phone call.

Here is where it stops being an abstract market observation and starts showing up on the desk. Across our active searches, the volume of open roles is the highest we have seen, and the candidate response rate is the lowest. Those two facts are not a coincidence.

A strong systems engineer in this market is not waiting to be found, they are being approached several times a week – by in-house recruiters, by agencies, or by founders directly.

Picture a senior GNC engineer who has had the same approach from six companies this month. The seventh, yours, is the best role of the lot. They will never know, because it landed in the same muted inbox as the other six. The genuinely good opportunities – and there are many right now – are disappearing into a wall of noise the candidate learned to tune out months ago. The scarcest thing in the space talent market in 2026 is not a qualified engineer – it is thirty minutes of that engineer’s attention.

The irony, and it is a useful one, is that once you have the attention, the rest is often easy. When we get a strong candidate onto a call, conversion is high – because the companies hiring right now are doing genuinely remarkable work, and the pitch makes itself. The difficulty has moved upstream and it is no longer closing the candidate, it’s reaching them at all.

Why this changes how a search should be run.

If the binding constraint were supply, the answer would be to widen the funnel: post more, source harder, lower the bar. That is what most companies are doing, and it is precisely the wrong response to an attention problem. Adding more outreach to a market already drowning in outreach makes you part of the noise, not the signal.

The companies winning in this market are not the ones contacting the most people. They are the ones who reach the right people with something that reads as genuine, and who then move fast enough to keep the attention they earned. Because attention, once you have it, has a short shelf life. A candidate who finally took the call and liked what they heard will not wait three weeks for a second interview while holding two other offers. The delay itself becomes the message and they read it as how you will operate once they’re in the job, and they are usually right.

There is a related shift worth flagging, which we’ll cover in a later blog: the roles themselves are broadening. The market is asking more often for engineers who can move across disciplines rather than sit in one lane. That widens who you can consider – but it does not loosen the attention constraint. It just changes who you are competing to reach.

The honest issue is that the capital driving all this is real but not guaranteed: Golden Dome has already seen contracting delays, and an IPO roadshow is not a closing. Some of the demand pulling on the candidate pool today rests on funding that has been announced but not yet fully deployed.

The reframe that matters.

“Talent shortage” is a comfortable story because it puts the cause outside the company. There simply aren’t enough people; nothing to be done but wait for the pipeline to fill.

“Attention collapse” is less comfortable, because it puts the variable back inside the company’s control. The people exist, but the question is whether you can reach them, say something worth their thirty minutes, and move quickly enough to keep them once you have. In a market this loud, that is the whole game.

When a commercial space company wins its first classified contract, the excitement doesn’t last long. Pretty quickly, someone asks the question nobody has answered before: how do you build a team with security clearances when nobody on staff has one?

It’s one of the most common turning points for growth-stage space companies. Get it right and you open up a whole category of government revenue. Get it wrong and you spend 12 months burning through budget while the contract sits understaffed.

The Timeline Nobody Plans For

The first thing most companies underestimate is how long clearances actually take.

A Secret clearance: four to eight months. Top Secret: eight to fourteen months. TS/SCI with a polygraph: over 18 months.

You can’t speed this up. No amount of money, urgency, or pressure from leadership changes the timeline. The investigation takes as long as it takes. For a company that just won a contract with a six-month performance period, the math is simple: if the team doesn’t exist yet, you’re already behind.

That’s why the companies that handle this well start planning the cleared workforce before the contract is awarded. If you’re bidding on classified work, the clearance pipeline should be part of the proposal, not something you figure out after you win.

Sponsoring vs. Requiring

You need cleared people, so you hire cleared people. The problem is that the pool of engineers who already hold clearances, have the specific technical skills you need, and are willing to move to your company is tiny. For a niche discipline like propulsion, GNC, or flight software, that pool might be fewer than 50 people in the entire country.

By requiring an active clearance, you’re filtering out hundreds of engineers who are technically qualified and could get cleared – they just haven’t been through the process yet.

The alternative is to sponsor clearances. Hire engineers who are eligible (US citizens with clean backgrounds) and start the clearance process as part of onboarding. It’s slower for the individual role, but it opens up a much bigger candidate pool.

The approach that works best is a mix: hire two or three people who already have clearances to anchor the classified program, and at the same time, sponsor clearances for a larger group of strong engineers who can work on the unclassified parts while their investigations process. By the time their clearances come through, they already know the company, the tech, and the program. They just get access to the classified layer.

The Facility Comes First

Here’s something that catches a lot of companies off guard: you need an approved secure facility before cleared engineers can actually do classified work.

A SCIF or cleared workspace needs approval from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), and that process takes six to twelve months on its own. If you’re hiring cleared people but don’t have an approved space for them to work in, those clearances just sit there.

The companies that do this well run the facility accreditation in parallel with the first wave of clearance sponsorships. The engineers and the building are ready at roughly the same time. The ones that do it in sequence – facility first, then people – add six to twelve months to their timeline.

Not Everything Is Classified

This is the part that a lot of first-time defense entrants miss. A classified program doesn’t mean every task on that program is classified.

Most programs have big chunks of unclassified work: software development environments, simulation tools, design work that doesn’t involve classified inputs, testing infrastructure. All of that can be done by uncleared engineers.

The smart move is to structure the program so that as much work as possible can be done in the open, with classified access limited to the people and tasks that actually need it. This keeps the program moving while clearances are in process, and it means you need fewer clearances overall — which saves time and money.

If your program architecture requires every engineer to touch classified data, you’ve created a bottleneck. If you compartment the classified work to specific roles and interfaces, you can build a bigger team faster with a smaller cleared core.

Where the Cleared Work Happens

Classified work happens in specific places. If your company is based somewhere without defense infrastructure – no SCIFs, no cleared talent pool, no proximity to the agencies you’re serving – you’ll need to think about where the classified team actually sits.

A lot of commercial space companies solve this by opening a second office in a defense hub: Colorado Springs, the DC corridor, Huntsville, or parts of Southern California. It’s a real investment, but it solves two problems at once – facility access and local talent.

The Denver and Colorado Springs corridor is becoming the default for space companies entering classified work. The Space Force is headquartered there, there’s a deep pool of cleared talent, and the defense-adjacent company ecosystem makes it structurally easier to build a cleared team than starting from scratch somewhere that doesn’t have that infrastructure.

The Takeaway

Building a cleared engineering team isn’t the same as building a commercial team on a longer timeline. It’s a different challenge that needs parallel planning across people, facilities, and program structure.

The companies that do it well treat the clearance pipeline as infrastructure – something you build and maintain, not something you scramble to create every time a contract needs it. They sponsor clearances early, structure programs so uncleared engineers can contribute from day one, and make facility decisions early enough that the space is ready when the people are.

The ones that treat it as a hiring problem to deal with after the win – posting “active clearance required” and waiting – end up 12 months into a contract with a team that’s still half-built and a customer that’s running out of patience.

There’s a common assumption in the space sector: because the work involves hardware, everything is onsite. Candidates assume it. Companies assume candidates assume it. And neither side checks whether it’s actually true.

We did. Based on placement data from the past 60 days across the US space sector, here’s how work arrangements are actually breaking down.

The Numbers

44% hybrid. 38% on-site. 18% remote.

The hybrid number is the one that surprises people. In a sector built around clean rooms, secure facilities, and classified programs, nearly half of all placed roles offer some flexibility on where the work gets done.

Why Hybrid Works in Space

Most space companies building hardware need engineers physically present for certain things – lab work, integration, testing, and program reviews. But not for everything, and not every day.

The design work, the simulation, the documentation, the code reviews – that can happen from anywhere. A flight software engineer might spend three days in the lab during integration and work from home during the design phase. A systems engineer might be onsite for a week-long review and flexible the rest of the month.

The companies that have figured this out are the ones getting the best candidates. Instead of applying a blanket “everyone in the office” policy, they ask a simpler question: what does this person actually need to be in the building for?

That distinction matters. The companies making it are filling roles faster than the ones that aren’t.

The 38% That Has to Be Onsite

Some roles just can’t be done remotely. A manufacturing engineer on a satellite assembly line needs to be in the clean room. A test engineer running vibration or thermal vacuum campaigns needs to be at the facility. Anyone working on a classified program in a SCIF has no remote option regardless of what their day-to-day work involves.

These aren’t policy choices. They’re structural requirements. Hardware and classified information don’t leave the building.

The difference between companies that handle this well and those that don’t comes down to honesty. The ones that explain why a role is onsite – what the facility requirements are, what a typical day looks like, whether there’s any flexibility once you’re established – keep candidates engaged. The ones that just list “onsite required” with no context lose people before the first conversation.

And companies that advertise “flexible work” for a role that requires daily SCIF access damage their credibility with candidates who can spot the mismatch immediately.

The 18% That’s Growing

Fully remote roles in space tend to cluster in a few areas: software engineering that doesn’t touch flight systems directly (DevOps, cloud infrastructure, data engineering), business development and sales, and senior advisory positions.

18% is smaller than what candidates from broader tech would expect. But it’s bigger than it was two years ago, and it’s growing. As more space companies build software platforms alongside their hardware, the share of roles that don’t need physical presence is expanding.

For candidates coming from pure software backgrounds who are curious about space, remote roles are often the way in. For companies, offering remote on roles that genuinely support it means hiring from the entire US talent pool – not just the engineers who happen to live near your facility. In a market where the local candidate pool for some disciplines is measured in dozens, that geographic reach makes a real difference.

What This Means If You’re Looking for a Role

Don’t assume hybrid means onsite in disguise

A lot of the 44% hybrid roles offer real flexibility. Ask early in the process what the arrangement actually looks like – the answer varies more than most people expect.

If you’re willing to be onsite, say so

In a tight market, your willingness to be physically present – especially for clearance-required or hardware roles – gives you an edge over candidates who lead with flexibility demands.

If you need remote, the options exist, but they’re specific

Software roles, BD, and certain program management positions can work remotely. Be realistic about which roles structurally support it and which don’t.

What This Means If You’re Hiring

Look at your on-site policy role by role

If you’re applying the same rule to every position, you’re probably losing candidates for roles that don’t actually require full-time physical presence. The 44% hybrid number tells you most of your competitors have already made this distinction.

Be specific in your job postings

“Hybrid” means different things to different companies. Three days onsite with real flexibility, or four days onsite with one remote Friday? The more specific you are, the fewer candidates drop out because of mismatched expectations.

Treat remote as a hiring advantage, not just a perk

For roles that can genuinely be done remotely, offering that flexibility opens up the entire national candidate pool. That can be the difference between filling a role in four weeks and searching for four months.

The Takeaway

The space sector is more flexible than its reputation suggests. “Space equals onsite” is outdated. The reality – nearly half hybrid, a growing remote segment – creates opportunity for companies and candidates who understand what the market actually looks like right now.

The Department of Commerce just released a draft licensing framework for commercial space activities that have never had a clear regulatory home. On-orbit refueling. Satellite servicing. Debris removal. In-space manufacturing.

These are things companies have been building toward for years. But until now, there was no defined process for the US government to say “yes, you can do this.” The FAA licenses launches. The FCC licenses spectrum. NOAA licenses remote sensing. Nobody licensed “approach another satellite and fix it.”

That gap just closed. The new framework creates a voluntary licensing process with a presumption of approval and deadlines for the government to respond. Industry reaction has been positive, with some arguing it could bring $50 billion in new investment into US space markets.

For the talent market, the effect is simpler: when investors feel confident the government won’t block an activity, they fund it. And when they fund it, companies hire.

Why This Matters

It might seem like a regulatory filing shouldn’t affect hiring. But for space companies working on new kinds of missions, regulatory clarity is one of the biggest things investors look at before writing a check.

Think about it from an investor’s perspective. A company builds a vehicle that can approach a dead satellite and deorbit it. The engineering works. The business model makes sense. But when the investor asks “is this legal?” the answer until now was “probably, but there’s no formal process to get approval.” That’s not good enough for a Series B decision.

The Commerce Department framework gives those investors a real answer. There’s now a process, a timeline, and a presumption that the license will be granted. That changes the risk calculation, which unlocks capital, which funds teams.

Who This Affects

The companies that benefit most are the ones working on what the industry calls ISAM – in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. A few years ago, this was mostly PowerPoint; now it’s funded and building hardware.

Satellite servicing is the most developed category

Companies like Starfish Space (which just raised $100 million), Astroscale, and others are building spacecraft that can approach, inspect, refuel, or repair satellites already in orbit. The skills involved – flying one spacecraft close to another, grabbing onto it, doing something useful – are technically demanding, and very few people have done it operationally.

Debris removal is closely related

Capturing a piece of space junk and bringing it down safely requires many of the same skills: orbital mechanics, GNC, robotic systems. The difference is that debris doesn’t cooperate – it’s tumbling, uncontrolled, and not designed to be grabbed.

On-orbit refueling is being pioneered by companies like Orbit Fab

They’re building fuel depots in space – which means propulsion engineering, fluid systems, and spacecraft integration in environments where nothing is easy.

In-space manufacturing is the earliest stage

Companies exploring making things in microgravity – pharmaceuticals, fiber optics, advanced materials – now have a licensing path they didn’t have before.

What It Means for Hiring

Each of these categories needs people. And the talent pools are small.

Proximity operations engineers

The people who figure out how to fly one spacecraft right next to another without crashing into it – are already one of the hardest hires in the sector. Multiple satellite servicing companies are now funded, and this framework gives them a path to actually operate. Demand for this skillset is going up.

Robotic systems engineers

Who can design arms, grapple mechanisms, and capture systems are needed across servicing, debris removal, and assembly programs. This is a niche within a niche, and the candidate pool is mostly coming from NASA’s robotics programs and a handful of defense contractors.

GNC and orbital mechanics engineers

Are relevant across every ISAM application. Approaching another object in orbit, matching its speed and trajectory, and executing a controlled interaction – that’s GNC work, and it’s directly transferable to defense programs, commercial station docking, and the Artemis architecture.

Regulatory affairs professionals

With space expertise are the less obvious hire that’s about to get much more important. Companies navigating this new framework – and eventually whatever mandatory version follows it – need people who understand both the policy side and the technical details. That’s a very small talent pool.

The Bigger Picture

This framework doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Starfish Space just raised $100 million. The Golden Dome contracts include companies with satellite servicing capabilities. The defense sector is investing heavily in space domain awareness, which overlaps with the same proximity operations skills that ISAM companies need.

The $50 billion investment figure is speculative. But the direction is clear. The US government is actively creating conditions for these activities to scale – through the executive order that mandated this framework, through defense spending that values these capabilities, and through bipartisan support for commercial space.

For the companies that have been building this technology ahead of the regulatory framework, the timing is good. They have the tech, they’re getting the funding, and now they have the licensing path. What most of them don’t have yet is enough people.

The Takeaway

Regulation isn’t usually the most exciting space news. But this one matters because it removes a barrier that was sitting between funded technology and operational reality.

The companies working on satellite servicing, debris removal, refueling, and in-space manufacturing are moving into a growth phase. The engineers who’ve been building skills in proximity operations, robotics, and orbital mechanics are about to be in higher demand than ever. And the companies that start hiring for these roles now – before the framework is finalized and the investment wave peaks – will be the ones with teams in place when the work arrives.

There’s a pattern that shows up regularly across growth-stage space companies, and it rarely gets diagnosed correctly.

A company hires a strong systems engineer. The person is exactly what the team needs – technically sharp, experienced with the relevant subsystems, capable of working autonomously in a fast-moving environment. Six months in, the company has doubled its engineering headcount. Twelve months in, the engineer is spending most of their time in program reviews, managing subcontractors, and writing documentation. The spacecraft design work that drew them to the role has been handed to the junior engineers they helped bring on board.

By month 14, they’re interviewing elsewhere. By month 18, they’re gone.

The company restarts the search – for the same role, at a higher salary, in a market that’s gotten more competitive since the last time they hired.

The Role Evolved. The Conversation Didn’t

This isn’t a story about bad hires. The engineer was the right person for the role as it existed when they joined. The problem is that in a scaling space company, roles don’t stay the same for long. A 30-person company that grows to 80 in 18 months has fundamentally different needs at every level. The systems engineer who was hands-on-keyboard designing architecture is now, whether anyone planned it or not, functioning as a technical program manager.

That evolution is natural and often necessary. Someone has to manage the complexity that comes with growth. But when the transition happens by default rather than by design – when the engineer realizes they’ve drifted into a different job without anyone acknowledging it – the result is disengagement followed by departure.

The cost in the space sector is higher than in most industries. Replacing a mid-to-senior engineer takes three to six months when you factor in the search, the clearance timeline if applicable, and the onboarding period before the new hire is contributing at full capacity. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door – understanding of the mission architecture, relationships with the team, context on design decisions that were never fully documented – doesn’t come back.

Why This Happens More in Space

Every growing company deals with role evolution. What makes it more acute in the space sector is the nature of the people and the work.

Engineers who choose space tend to be mission-driven. They joined because they want to build spacecraft, design propulsion systems, write flight software, or solve GNC problems. The technical work isn’t just their job – it’s their identity. When that work gets replaced by management overhead, the loss feels personal in a way it might not for an engineer in a less mission-connected industry.

The technical complexity of space programs also makes the transition harder to manage gracefully. In a SaaS company, you can promote a senior engineer to engineering manager and their direct reports can largely self-direct their technical work. In a space company, the technical decisions are higher-stakes, the regulatory requirements are more demanding, and the consequences of getting something wrong are more severe. The temptation is always to keep the most experienced person close to the decisions – which means close to the meetings, the reviews, and the vendor calls, and further from the engineering.

And because the candidate pool for experienced space engineers is small, the cost of losing someone and replacing them is disproportionately high compared to other sectors.

What the Companies That Retain Do Differently

The space companies with the strongest retention – the ones where senior engineers stay for three, four, five years – tend to do a few things that others don’t.

They have the 12-month conversation at the point of hire.

During the interview process, they’re transparent about what the role looks like today and what it’s likely to look like in a year. They describe the growth trajectory honestly: “Right now, you’ll be hands-on designing the thermal subsystem. In 12 months, if we’ve grown the way we plan to, you’ll probably be leading a team of three and spending more time on program integration. Is that a path you want?” The engineer who says yes to that question with full information is far more likely to stay than the one who discovers it by surprise.

They build technical tracks alongside management tracks.

The assumption that the only way to advance as an engineer is to manage people is what causes the most preventable attrition. Companies that create principal engineer, technical fellow, or chief engineer roles – positions with seniority, compensation, and influence that don’t require managing direct reports – give their best technical people a reason to stay. The GNC engineer who wants to spend the next five years solving increasingly complex navigation problems shouldn’t have to become a people manager to get promoted.

They audit role drift proactively.

Every six months, someone – a manager, a founder, an HR lead – should be asking: is this person still doing the job they were hired for? If the answer is no, is the new version of the role something they want? If it’s not, what can be restructured before they start looking elsewhere? This conversation is cheap. The replacement search is not.

They compensate for scope changes.

When a role expands significantly – when the engineer who was hired as an individual contributor is now effectively managing a program – the compensation should reflect that. Companies that let scope creep happen without adjusting the title or pay are telling the engineer that their expanded contribution isn’t valued. That message gets received clearly, even if it’s never said out loud.

The Takeaway

Losing a strong engineer after 12-18 months is one of the most expensive and preventable problems in the space sector. It’s rarely caused by compensation alone, and it’s rarely caused by the market offering something better. It’s caused by a gap between what the person signed up for and what the role became.

The companies that close that gap – with honest conversations, parallel career tracks, and proactive check-ins – keep their best people. The ones that let roles evolve by default and hope the engineer will adapt keep restarting searches they shouldn’t have to run.

Across more than 3,000 searches tracked in the US space sector since 2024, one pattern is consistent: demand for certain engineering disciplines is growing faster than the candidate pool can keep up.

That’s not a generic talent shortage. It’s a concentration problem – too many well-funded companies hiring for the same specialized roles at the same time, in a sector where the candidate pool for each discipline is measured in hundreds, not thousands.

Here are the five roles that space companies are struggling to fill right now, and what’s driving the constraint in each.

1. Flight Software Engineers

Flight software is the single most frequently posted technical role across our searches, with 46 open positions tracked over the past year. These engineers build the software that controls spacecraft in real time – attitude determination, command sequencing, autonomous operations, fault management. The environment is safety-critical, the latency tolerance is zero, and the testing requirements are far more rigorous than anything in commercial software.

The constraint: most software engineers in the US work in web, cloud, or enterprise environments. The number who have hands-on experience writing real-time embedded software for spacecraft – in C or C++, running on radiation-hardened processors, subject to DO-178C or equivalent standards – is a fraction of the broader software market. And the companies that have these engineers (SpaceX, JPL, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman) are not losing them quickly.

For growth-stage space companies, this means competing against both primes and other startups for a pool that was built over decades at a handful of organizations. The candidate who can write flight software for your mission is also being recruited for Artemis, for commercial station programs, and for defense constellation builds.

2. GNC Engineers

Guidance, navigation, and control – the discipline that determines whether a spacecraft can get where it needs to go, maintain its orientation, and execute maneuvers autonomously – generated 26 tracked searches in the past year. But the difficulty of filling these roles far exceeds what that number suggests.

GNC engineering sits at the intersection of applied mathematics, orbital mechanics, and control systems theory. The candidates who can design algorithms for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, or build guidance solutions for lunar landing trajectories, have typically spent years in academic research or at organizations like NASA, JPL, or Draper before they’re operationally ready.

The Artemis acceleration is making this worse. As NASA’s mission cadence increases and commercial lunar programs scale alongside it, GNC engineers with deep space experience are among the most contested profiles in the sector. Companies building satellite servicing vehicles, space stations, and lunar landers are all hiring for the same skillset.

3. Power Electronics / EPS Engineers

This is the role that surprises people outside the sector. Electrical power systems – the engineers who design how a spacecraft generates, stores, distributes, and manages power – are quietly one of the hardest hires in space.

Across our searches, power electronics and EPS roles consistently take longer to fill than mechanical or software positions. The reason is structural: power electronics engineering has a much smaller academic pipeline than other electrical engineering subdisciplines. Most EE graduates specialize in signal processing, communications, or digital design. The subset who specialize in power conversion, battery management, solar array regulation, and high-voltage distribution for space applications is genuinely small.

And unlike software, where transferable skills from adjacent industries can bridge the gap, power electronics for spacecraft is technically distinct enough that a power engineer from automotive or industrial applications needs significant ramp-up time. The thermal environment, the radiation constraints, and the reliability requirements are different in ways that matter.

4. Thermal Engineers

With 34 open positions tracked in the past year, thermal engineering is the fourth most frequently posted technical role – and one of the least visible to people outside the industry.

Every spacecraft generates heat and operates in an environment where thermal management is existential. Too hot and components fail. Too cold and batteries die. The thermal engineer designs the systems that keep everything within operating range – heat pipes, radiators, thermal coatings, heaters, and the analytical models that predict how the spacecraft will behave across its orbital profile.

The constraint is similar to power electronics: the academic pipeline is thin. Thermal engineering is often a subdiscipline within mechanical engineering programs, and relatively few graduates specialize deeply enough to be immediately useful on a spacecraft program. The experienced thermal engineers who exist tend to be well-compensated and embedded in programs they’re unlikely to leave without a compelling reason.

5. Propulsion Engineers

Propulsion generated 19 tracked searches in the past year – a smaller number than the other four, but the fill rate is among the lowest. These are the engineers who design, test, and qualify the systems that actually move spacecraft: chemical thrusters, electric propulsion, cold gas systems, and increasingly, novel approaches like nuclear thermal propulsion.

The constraint here is both supply and geography. Propulsion work requires physical test infrastructure – vacuum chambers, thrust stands, propellant handling facilities – which concentrates the work at specific locations. Companies in New Mexico, Colorado, and parts of California dominate propulsion hiring, and candidates must be willing to work on-site at facilities that may be in less urbanized areas.

The Artemis program’s expansion and the growing interest in in-space propulsion for satellite servicing and orbital transfer vehicles are driving new demand. At the same time, the experienced propulsion engineers at Aerojet Rocketdyne, Blue Origin, and SpaceX are locked into multi-year programs and not actively looking.

What Connects These Five

The common thread across all five roles isn’t just scarcity. It’s that the candidate pools were built over decades by a small number of organizations – primarily NASA, its prime contractors, and a handful of defense companies – and the commercial space sector’s explosive growth over the past five years has created demand that this pipeline was never designed to support.

Every one of these disciplines has the same structural challenge: the number of companies hiring has grown much faster than the number of qualified engineers entering the market. And because these roles require years of specialized experience that can’t be shortcutted through bootcamps or cross-training programs, the supply constraint isn’t resolving quickly.

For companies hiring in any of these five areas, the implications are practical. The search will take longer than you expect. The compensation will be higher than your internal benchmarks suggest. And the candidate you want is almost certainly talking to someone else. The companies that plan for that reality – by building a pipeline early, pricing roles accurately, and moving fast when they find the right person – are the ones that fill these positions. The ones that treat them like any other engineering hire are the ones still searching six months later.