# Director of Hardware Engineering at Albedo

- Company: Albedo
- What the company does: Bringing space closer to Earth. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://albedo.com
- Type: Startups
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: Broomfield, CO
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $250K to $275K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-13
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/albedo/jobs/4364157009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/albedo-director-of-hardware-engineering/

## About the role

Albedo is hiring a Director of Hardware Engineering to lead our hardware org across opto-mechanical, structural, thermal, and avionics disciplines. You'll own the design margin discipline for precision spaceflight hardware, drive the AIT build flow from mirror fabrication through integration and environmental testing, and execute our make-vs-buy strategy across the org as we scale to production.

## What they're looking for

- Twelve-plus years in precision spaceflight hardware, with at least four leading hardware engineering managers
- Hands-on depth in opto-mechanical engineering, structural dynamics, or precision pointing systems — you have personally owned a precision payload or precision pointing chain end-to-end
- Track record of design margin discipline against NASA, MIL, or equivalent standards, with examples where your margin calls held up under flight conditions
- Demonstrated cross-disciplinary system reasoning: you think in budgets across optics, structures, thermal, GNC, mass, and power, and you can trace budget violations to root cause
- Experience leading hardware through environmental test campaigns and on-orbit anomaly resolution
- Real make-vs-buy decisions you have owned and can defend with cost, schedule, and capability data

Tags: Engineering Operations