Senior Mechanical Engineer

Job Description

Rockets have not gotten wider. Satellites need far more power than they used to. The only way through is structures that pack into a fairing and unfold into something massive on orbit.

Gama is building that: ultra-light deployable solar arrays, from 3 kW to over 100 kW, in a factory sized for 100 MW a year by 2028. Almost nothing about this exists off the shelf. Most of it has to be invented, tested, and made manufacturable, here, by a small team.

We are hiring a senior mechanical engineer to own a large piece of that invention. You do not need to have worked on a solar array. You do need to have built something new from nothing and made it work at scale. Gama operates with extreme ownership: you own the outcome, not just the parts or the process.

Your Mission Will Be To

• Design, develop and qualify key mechanical subsystems of an extremely lightweight deployable solar array, taking end-to-end ownership of a major share of the mechanical architecture, including panel structure and PV integration
• Drive design trades and analyses (structural, thermal, mechanism kinematics) from early concept through detailed design and test. Requirements at Gama are a starting hypothesis; you are expected to challenge them and make them better. Start from physics, not from heritage.
• Get hands‑on with hardware. Prototype in the morning, put it in the thermal chamber in the afternoon, learn from what broke, iterate. We test in‑house and we treat failure as data.
• Design for a production line, not a one‑off. 100 MW a year means every part you draw has to be made thousands of times.
• Build robust, flight‑proven solutions that meet aggressive mass and volume targets in demanding launch and orbital environments
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you: mentor, review, and become the person others come to when the physics gets hard.

Requirements

Must have

• Multiple full development cycles under your belt: you have taken hardware from blank sheet to working hardware more than once. Any domain: robotics, motorsport, aircraft, drones, medical devices, consumer hardware, industrial machinery, research rigs. What matters is that it did not exist before, you designed it, it got built, and it worked.
• First‑principles mechanical engineering. Given an unfamiliar problem, you open the textbook, and find the governing equations. You can explain the "why" behind every design decision you have made.
• Fluency with CAD (e.g. CATIA, Siemens NX, Solidworks) and FEA tools; comfort with hand calculations to sanity‑check results
• Strong analytical skills, a proactive attitude, excellent interpersonal skills and unbounded curiosity
• Autonomy, and a willingness to be fully responsible for a significant part of the finished product
• A proven track record of delivering reliable systems for harsh environments
• Roughly 5+ years of relevant experience, but we care far more about what you built than how long you have been working.
• Professional English. French is a plus, not a requirement.

Nice to have

• Hands‑on experience in spacecraft or launch vehicle mechanical design, ideally with direct exposure to solar array or deployable panel structures, within a fast‑paced New Space environment
• Experience with design for manufacturing, making a design that is not only producible but easy to make

This role is probably not for you if your typical work has been executing a design against a standard or requirements list handed to you, or if you are most comfortable working in a rigidly defined engineering process. At Gama, everyone is a systems engineer and we embrace the ownership and the messy reality of hardware development to produce world‑changing products.