Category: Hiring Execution

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.

Blue Origin launched its New Glenn rocket for the third time, and for the first time, it did so with a previously flown booster. The first stage – named “Never Tell Me the Odds” – lifted off from Cape Canaveral, separated from the upper stage, and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The booster reuse worked.

The upper stage didn’t. The AST SpaceMobile satellite it was carrying ended up in an off-nominal orbit, meaning something went wrong after stage separation. The payload is likely a loss. For Blue Origin, it’s a mixed result.

For the space sector’s talent market, the booster reuse is the story that matters.

Why Reuse Changes the Workforce Equation

SpaceX has been reusing Falcon 9 boosters for nearly a decade. It’s the primary reason SpaceX dominates the global launch market – reuse brings the cost per kilogram to orbit down dramatically, which brings the cost of everything else down with it.

Blue Origin achieving booster reuse on New Glenn means there is now a second company capable of operating a reusable heavy-lift rocket. That’s not a small thing. A second reusable launch provider means more launch capacity, more competition on price, and more customers who can afford to put payloads in orbit.

Each of those dynamics creates hiring demand.

More launch capacity means more missions, which means more launch operations staff – the pad technicians, the mission integration engineers, the range safety officers, the logistics coordinators who make each flight happen. Blue Origin’s VP of New Glenn mission management said in March that the company is focused on “increasing resources, tooling, and processes” to scale its flight rate. That’s a hiring statement.

More competition on price means more satellite companies can afford to launch, which means more spacecraft need to be built, tested, and operated. The downstream hiring effect of cheaper access to orbit touches every segment of the space economy – from EO startups to constellation operators to in-space manufacturing companies.

And more customers means Blue Origin itself needs to scale its commercial operations. The company’s manifest already includes missions for AST SpaceMobile, Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, and NASA’s lunar programs. Reuse is what makes that manifest economically viable. Without it, each New Glenn flight costs over $100 million to manufacture. With it, Blue Origin can begin approaching the flight economics that have made SpaceX’s model work.

The Talent Blue Origin Needs

Blue Origin is in the middle of a transition that has direct parallels to where SpaceX was seven or eight years ago: moving from a development company that builds and tests rockets to an operational company that launches them regularly. The company’s VP of New Glenn mission management said at Satellite 2026 that the focus is on “increasing resources, tooling, and processes” to scale flight rate.

That transition requires a different kind of workforce. Development-phase companies are dominated by design engineers – the people who figure out how to make things work. Operational-phase companies need a growing proportion of manufacturing engineers, operations staff, quality assurance specialists, and program managers who can keep a production line running while simultaneously supporting a launch cadence.

Blue Origin is hiring across all of these categories. The company has positions open at its facilities in Kent, Washington (manufacturing), Cape Canaveral (launch operations), and Huntsville, Alabama (engine production). As New Glenn’s flight rate increases – which reuse now makes possible – the headcount at each of those sites will need to grow.

The challenge is that many of the people Blue Origin needs are the same people every other space company wants. An operations engineer with launch vehicle experience can work at SpaceX, at ULA, at Rocket Lab, or at Blue Origin. A manufacturing engineer who knows how to build rocket engines at scale is relevant to Aerojet Rocketdyne’s RS-25 production line for Artemis as much as to Blue Origin’s BE-4 line.

The AST SpaceMobile Dimension

It’s worth noting what was on this particular rocket: a BlueBird 7 satellite for AST SpaceMobile, one of EVONA’s clients and one of the most ambitious companies in the space sector. AST SpaceMobile is building a network that delivers broadband connectivity directly to unmodified mobile phones from space. The BlueBird satellites are among the largest commercial spacecraft ever deployed, with antenna arrays spanning over 2,400 square feet.

The satellite ending up in the wrong orbit is a setback for AST SpaceMobile’s constellation buildout. But it’s also a reminder of the stakes involved when commercial space companies depend on launch providers. When a payload is lost or degraded, the hiring impact cascades – the satellite company may need to accelerate production of a replacement, which requires manufacturing and integration engineers, while simultaneously adjusting its operational timeline, which affects mission operations and ground segment staffing.

This interdependency between launch providers and their customers is one of the features of the space economy that makes the talent market so interconnected. A problem at one company creates ripple effects across several others.

What This Means for the Market

Blue Origin’s booster reuse milestone confirms what the market has been anticipating: there will be two major reusable launch providers operating at commercial scale. SpaceX is approaching its 600th Falcon booster landing. Blue Origin is at its first. But the trajectory is clear, and the hiring implications follow.

For companies that use launch services, a second competitive option is a positive development. It means more flexibility on timing, potentially lower costs, and reduced dependence on a single provider. But it also means another major employer absorbing engineers from an already constrained market.

For candidates, Blue Origin’s transition to operational reuse makes it a more compelling employer than it was a year ago. A company that is launching regularly is a company where your work ships. For engineers who want to see their designs fly rather than sit in testing cycles, that’s a meaningful shift.

And for every other company hiring in the space sector, Blue Origin’s growth adds one more competitor to a talent market that is already stretched. The GNC engineer, the propulsion specialist, the launch operations lead — these people have more options than ever. The companies that win their attention will be the ones that move fastest, offer the clearest growth path, and understand that in this market, hiring is as much a competitive capability as the technology itself.

Most space companies spend weeks refining a job description before posting it. They debate the requirements, the experience level, the technical stack. They wordsmith the “about us” section. Then they post it and wait.

Meanwhile, the engineer they’re trying to hire has already formed an opinion about their company — and it wasn’t based on the job description. It was based on what they could find when they searched the company name, what their network said about working there, and whether the company had ever shown up in their feed with something worth reading.

In a market where experienced engineers have multiple options and limited patience, employer competitiveness is decided before the job description is ever seen.

The Perception Problem

Space companies tend to think of employer brand as a nice-to-have – something for the careers page, a project for when the team gets bigger. But in practice, employer brand is the filter that determines whether a candidate opens your message, clicks on your role, or responds to your recruiter.

A senior systems engineer considering a move is not reading every job description that matches their keywords. They’re scanning for signals.

• Does this company seem like it’s doing meaningful work?
• Are they scaling or struggling?
• Do they look like somewhere an experienced person would be challenged, or somewhere they’d be cleaning up a mess?

Those signals come from how the company presents itself to the market – not from the job spec. A company with 200 employees, strong funding, and important programs can still look invisible to candidates if it has no content, no presence, and no discernible identity beyond its job postings.

Why This Matters More in Space

Every sector has competition for experienced hires. What makes space different is the degree of constraint.

In most engineering markets, if 50 companies are hiring for the same role, there might be 5,000 qualified candidates. In space – particularly for clearance-required, onsite, human-rated, or mission-critical roles – the candidate pool can be as small as 200 to 300 people nationally.

When the pool is that constrained, every candidate interaction matters. The engineer who doesn’t respond to your recruiter’s outreach might have responded if they’d already encountered your company’s name in a market intelligence piece, a technical blog, or a LinkedIn post from someone on your leadership team. The difference between a cold message from an unknown company and a warm message from a name the candidate recognizes is often the difference between getting a response and getting ignored.

This is where employer competitiveness becomes a hiring capability, not a marketing exercise.

What Candidates Actually Look For

Across the searches we run in the US space sector, the factors that influence a candidate’s perception of an employer tend to fall into a consistent pattern.

Candidates want mission clarity.

Candidates want to understand what the company is building, why it matters, and where it sits in the broader space ecosystem. “We’re building satellites” doesn’t cut it when the candidate can choose between EO, comms, defense, hosted payloads, and in-space manufacturing companies that are all hiring for similar roles. The companies that attract the strongest candidates are the ones that can articulate a specific, compelling reason to join — not just a technical scope, but a story that connects the work to something larger.

Candidates wantgrowth visibility.

Engineers at the mid-to-senior level want to join companies that are going somewhere. But they assess that through signals, not promises. Recent funding rounds, named contract wins, a growing team, visible leadership, and content that shows the company is thinking about its market – these are all signals that a company is building momentum. Silence reads as stagnation, even when the reality is different.

Candidates want team credibility.

Candidates look at who else works there. Are there experienced people on the engineering team, or will they be the most senior person in the room? A company’s LinkedIn presence, its team page, and whether its engineers or leaders ever share anything publicly all contribute to a candidate’s sense of whether the team is credible and whether they’d be working alongside peers or inheriting a gap.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The companies that consistently outperform on candidate attraction – the ones where recruiter outreach gets a 30% response rate instead of 10% – tend to do a few things that their competitors don’t.

They produce content that goes deeper.

Instead of “we’re hiring” posts, they share perspectives on the market their candidates operate in. An insight about hiring trends in propulsion engineering, a piece on what’s happening in the defense-adjacent talent pipeline, a technical discussion from someone on the engineering team – these build recognition and trust over time.

They make their leadership visible.

A VP of Engineering who posts occasionally about the technical problems the team is solving does more for employer brand than a polished careers page. Candidates trust people more than companies, and a visible leader signals that the organization values communication and transparency.

They treat the candidate experience as part of the brand.

How fast the company responds, how well the interview is structured, and whether the recruiter can speak intelligently about the work – all of this shapes perception. Candidates talk to each other. In a market as small as space, a bad interview experience at one company reaches the next five candidates who are considering it.

The Takeaway

In a constrained market, the companies that hire best are the ones that candidates already want to work for before the role is ever posted. That doesn’t require a massive employer branding budget. It requires consistency, visibility, and the willingness to show up in the market as a company that understands the world its candidates operate in.

Job descriptions matter. But they’re the last thing a candidate reads, not the first. By the time they get to your job spec, the decision about whether to engage is already half made. The question is whether your company has done enough to earn that engagement before the role even goes live.

There’s a role that keeps appearing across our active searches this quarter, and it’s one that barely existed as a hiring category five years ago: computational engineering.

These are the people who build AI-driven simulation and design tools – software that allows a mechanical engineer to model a thruster, run a thousand design iterations, and identify the best solution in days rather than months. It’s not theoretical AI. It’s applied intelligence that directly accelerates how spacecraft, rockets, and satellite systems get designed and built.

And right now, nearly every growth-stage space company wants to hire them. The problem is that almost none of them can.

A Market That Didn’t Exist Five Years Ago

The candidates who have this skillset (genuine hands-on experience building computational tools for engineering simulation_ are a small group. Many of them were doing research work as recently as two or three years ago, building models in academic or R&D settings where half of what they produced never made it into production.

What’s changed is that space companies have realized the operational impact. When you can compress a design cycle from months to days, the cost savings run into the millions. Companies are now restructuring entire engineering workflows around AI-led processes, moving away from traditional design-test-iterate cycles toward simulation-first approaches.

The result is a surge in demand for a candidate pool that hasn’t had time to grow. The people who have been doing this work for four or five years are genuinely surprised by how sought-after they’ve become. Many of them still think of their skillset as too niche to have a strong market. They’re wrong – but they don’t know it yet, which means they’re not actively looking, and they’re not applying to job ads.

Why Traditional Hiring Doesn’t Work Here

Across our searches in this space, job postings are generating one or two applicants in three weeks. These candidates don’t respond to ads. They have to be found through targeted outreach, keyword-specific searching, and conversations that demonstrate an understanding of what they actually do.

Typically, companies don’t have the technical vocabulary to identify these profiles or the network to reach them. The job title varies wildly across companies: computational engineer, simulation software engineer, AI/ML engineer (applied), digital engineering lead. The same skillset lives under different names depending on whether the company came from an aerospace heritage or a software-first background.

This means the companies filling these roles are the ones that have invested in understanding what the candidate actually looks like, not just what the job description says.

The Skill That Separates Who Gets Hired

Here’s where it gets interesting. The differentiator in this market isn’t technical ability – most candidates at this level can build strong solutions. What separates the engineers who get hired from those who don’t is the ability to communicate their approach.

Space companies hiring for these roles aren’t just looking for someone who can code a simulation. They want someone who can break down a complex engineering problem, explain how they approached it, map out their reasoning, and present their solution to people outside their technical discipline. In a growth-stage environment where a computational engineer might need to explain their tools to a mechanical engineer, a program manager, or a VP who has no software background, that communication layer is essential.

We’ve seen candidates from major tech companies – engineers with impressive resumes and strong technical credentials – fail technical interviews at space companies because they couldn’t articulate their process. They could build the solution, but they couldn’t explain it. And we’ve seen hiring managers extend offers to candidates whose code wasn’t perfect but whose problem-solving framework and communication were exceptional. As one hiring manager put it: “If the approach is right, the specific tooling can be taught.”

What This Means

Computational engineering is quietly becoming one of the most strategically important hires a space company can make. But the talent market for it operates differently from almost every other engineering discipline in the sector. The candidates aren’t applying. The job titles aren’t standardized. And the skill that matters most in the interview isn’t the one most companies are screening for.

For companies planning to invest in AI-driven engineering workflows, the hiring strategy needs to start before the headcount opens – because by the time you post the role, the candidates you want are already in conversations with someone else.