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.