Senior Mechanical Engineer - Deployable Solar Arrays
Gama
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.
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.
- 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