The Roadmap Drives the Hiring
Lodestar Space, a frontier-tech company founded in 2023 with sixteen people split between London and Los Angeles, is hiring across AI, aerospace, and embedded domains with a focused bar for technical depth. This guide maps the teams, pay, process, locations, and traits that determine who gets hired and who thrives.
Thomas Santini and Neil Buchanan founded Lodestar in 2023 to build a platform-agnostic robotic arm that can inspect, protect, and repair satellites on orbit — an "orbital first responder." The company raised $2.5 million, TechCrunch reported, through UK Space Agency grants and a pre-seed round co-led by Inflection and Lunar Ventures, then joined Mandala Space Ventures' SoCal-UK Space Accelerator in mid-2024. Advisers include former SpaceX VP Lee Rosen and former Spaceflight CEO Curt Blake. The mission is explicitly defense-oriented: Buchanan has described space security as a "hair on fire" problem where Europe lacks sovereign capability to match adversaries, and the company's expansion to the US follows DoD demand for space superiority and deterrence.
Team Structure: London Builds the Body, Los Angeles Builds the Brain
In London, the core avionics group owns the embedded flight stack. FPGA engineers implement real-time control logic on radiation-tolerant hardware. Avionics hardware engineers design the power, compute, and interconnect boards that survive launch and orbit. Avionics software engineers write the bare-metal and RTOS firmware driving the arm's joints and sensors. These three roles sit at the hardware-software boundary where a single bit flip can lose a mission. Lodestar hires engineers who have shipped flight hardware, not just simulated it.
In El Segundo, five salaried software roles span a $99,000–$174,000 band (median $133,000):
- Payload Engineer owns the end-to-end engineering model from requirements through qualification
- State Estimation & Prediction engineers build filters and predictors that let an arm track an uncooperative target in microgravity
- Perception engineers develop computer-vision and ML pipelines for threat detection and pose estimation
- On-board Autonomy engineers integrate perception and control into decision-making that runs in communications-denied environments
- Simulations engineers maintain the mission simulation environment that validates all of the above before flight
- Director of Capture & Proposal Ops and a Technical Proposal Writer round out the LA office — evidence that winning DoD contracts is a first-class engineering discipline here, not an afterthought
The split is deliberate. The hardware-agnostic strategy, which involves designing the arm to fly on any partner tug or satellite bus, means every software engineer must write code that ports across compute platforms, and every avionics engineer must design interfaces that survive integration with vehicles they don't control. That constraint shapes the profile: generalists who have owned a subsystem from spec to test, not specialists who only optimize one layer.
All eight open technical roles are in-office. London roles are UK-based; LA roles are El Segundo-based. Remote work is not an option for any current posting.
Compensation: What the Numbers Show
Lodestar's job listings on the Zero G Talent board show salary bands directly — unusual transparency for a sixteen-person company. The Zero G Talent board ingests those listings at the source, giving a first-party view that supersedes aggregated third-party estimates.
| Role | Level(s) | Location | Posted Annual Band (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director of Capture & Proposal Ops | Director | Los Angeles, US | $175,000 – $250,000 |
| Software Engineer II: On-board Autonomy | II | Los Angeles, US | $115,000 – $174,000 |
| Software Engineer I: Payload Engineer | I | Los Angeles, US | $99,000 – $133,000 |
| Software Engineer I or II: State Estimation & Prediction | I–II | Los Angeles, US | $99,000 – $133,000 |
| Software Engineer I, II, III: Simulations | I–III | Los Angeles, US | $99,000 – $133,000 |
| Software Engineer I: Perception | I | Los Angeles, US | $99,000 – $133,000 |
The spread tells a clear story. Early-career and mid-level engineers share a consistent band regardless of specialty (perception, state estimation, simulation, payload, or autonomy), Zero G Talent's board data shows, suggesting the company values breadth and interchangeability over niche premiums. The On-board Autonomy role at level II breaks the ceiling at $174,000, as Zero G Talent's figures show, hinting that the autonomy stack carries a modest premium. The Director band sits in a different tier entirely, with Zero G Talent's board data showing a $250,000 top, reflecting the capture function's direct tie to revenue in a defense-focused business.
Alion's independent 2026 survey of six open Lodestar roles also reported a $133,000 average, aligning with the board's median, which Zero G Talent found to be $133,000. Levels.fyi's crowdsourced data (last updated September 2026) shows component-level figures (base, bonus, equity), but the board's posted bands remain the only figures the company itself has committed to in public postings.
Third-party sources conflict on the margins. Salary.com's $91,609 high-water mark for a "Case Management Program Clinical Coordinator" is clearly misattributed; no such role appears in Lodestar's postings. Levels.fyi's component breakdowns ($58K–$89K base, $20K–$35K bonus, $22K equity) are plausible for a Series A–stage space company but are employee-reported and not company-confirmed.
Treat the posted bands as negotiation anchors, not caps. A sixteen-person company building autonomous space vehicles for defense customers will have equity packages that vary widely by join date and role criticality; the board does not capture these details. For cash compensation, the table above is the most reliable benchmark available today.
The Hiring Process: Lean and Lab-Centered
Lodestar runs a lean hiring machine: eleven to fifty people total, founded in 2023, with six salaried roles posted in the current cycle. That scale shapes everything. No campus-recruiting pipeline, no automated resume filter, no dedicated talent-acquisition team large enough to insulate engineers from the process. The people who will review your code, your schematics, or your capture strategy are the same people who will sit next to you at the test rig in Los Angeles or the London lab.
Application Gate: Signal Over Volume
Every open role targets a specific technical lane. The job descriptions read like problem statements, not wish lists. A strong application leads with evidence that you have solved the class of problem the role owns, not years of experience.
For the Perception role ($99k–$133k), that means showing work on orbital or robotic vision pipelines: sensor fusion, feature tracking under noise, and real-time constraints. For the capture director role ($175k–$250k), it means a track record of winning classified or complex DoD/space contracts. The company's public posts repeat "high agency & extreme ownership" as a filter; candidates who frame past work as "I owned this subsystem from requirements through environmental test" pass the first screen. Generic "full-stack" resumes without a space or autonomy anchor do not.
Technical Screen: Depth in the Relevant Domain
The first live conversation is a technical phone screen with a peer engineer or the hiring lead. The scope mirrors the role's core discipline. Perception and State Estimation candidates walk through a filtering or estimation problem covering observability, outlier rejection, and compute budget. Autonomy candidates discuss behavior-tree or MPC architecture trade-offs for a satellite that must maneuver without ground-in-the-loop. Simulations candidates defend their physics-engine choices and verification methodology. Payload engineers talk through a board bring-up, EMI mitigation, or a thermal-vacuum test they wrote the procedure for.
The screen is not algorithmic trivia; it is a design review of a problem you have actually faced. Candidates who cannot articulate the failure modes they designed for, or who defer to "the team handled that," tend to stall here.
On-Site Loop: The Lab Is the Interview
Lodestar operates a hardware-in-the-loop facility in London with flat-sat racks, test rigs, and sensor suites, and partners with Surrey Space Centre for environmental qualification. The on-site loop centers on the lab. Expect a session with stations covering your discipline: a whiteboard architecture review, a live debugging or code-review exercise pulled from the current codebase, a hardware/simulation integration walkthrough, and a conversation with a cross-functional peer.
The company has hosted the Fifty Years 5050 cohort and the British Consulate-General at its LA lab; the same transparency applies to candidates. You will see the flat sats and the test rigs. If you have not worked in a clean-room or vibration-test environment, say so, but show how you would learn the protocol. "Extreme ownership" means you do not wait for a technician to hand you a report.
Capture and Proposal Track: A Distinct Lane
The Director of Capture and Proposal Operations role signals a separate, parallel process. This is not an engineering interview. It evaluates your ability to map Lodestar's autonomous-payload capability to specific government requirements, write winning volumes, and manage a colored-team review cycle. The screen includes a past-proposal debrief: win themes, compliance matrix, lessons learned. Compensation reflects the scarcity of this hybrid profile: $175k–$250k, the top of the board's band.
What Disqualifies
Three patterns consistently end a candidacy. First, inability to operate without a detailed spec: the company builds "the brain of a space fighter pilot" (per founder Neil Buchanan) for missions where the threat model evolves on orbit; engineers who need a requirements document before writing a test case do not fit. Second, siloed mindset: a perception engineer who cannot explain how their output feeds the autonomy stack, or a simulations engineer who has never validated against hardware data. Third, citizenship or clearance barriers that cannot be resolved on the company's timeline: several roles involve classified programs or ITAR-controlled hardware, and the small team cannot absorb long sponsorship or adjudication delays.
A Strong Application (Concrete)
- A one-page resume that leads with the hardest technical problem you solved, the constraints, and the measured result
- A GitHub link or portfolio with runnable code for the relevant domain (ROS 2 nodes, filter implementations, simulation scenarios, PCB layouts)
- A cover note (optional but read) that maps your experience to one of the six posted lanes and names the specific risk you would retire in your first 90 days
- For the capture role: a sanitized win-theme summary from a recent major proposal you led
The process moves fast when signal is clear. If you need six interview rounds to decide, this is not the company.
Three Sites, One Program
Lodestar operates across two primary sites: a London laboratory in the city centre and a Los Angeles hub carrying the bulk of current hiring, plus a testing partnership with Surrey Space Centre that functions as a de facto third facility for environmental qualification.
The London lab sits roughly 25 minutes from the UK Ministry of Defence and Westminster, a proximity the company treats as operational infrastructure rather than convenience. Paul Nicholson, after a January 2026 visit with Rajesh Agrawal, described seeing first-hand how autonomous space systems are being developed on the lab floor in the centre of London, not just talked about in strategy documents. "Being just that close to the UK Ministry of Defence & Westminster means there's no friction or substitute for policymakers seeing, firsthand, how autonomous space systems are built — on the lab floor, with real software & hardware demos, and direct conversations with engineers," he wrote. That access shapes the lab's character: a demonstration and engagement space as much as a development floor, where government stakeholders can witness perception and decision-making stacks running on hardware without leaving Whitehall.
The lab contains integration racks, compute for on-board autonomy, and sensor suites for robotic vision: the "platform-agnostic robotic vision and capture capability" the company describes in its LinkedIn positioning. The facility's value proposition is speed of feedback: engineers iterate while policymakers watch, closing the loop between policy intent and operational capability that Nicholson called "a critical mission."
Los Angeles is where the headcount sits. Every salaried role on that board as of the latest ingest lists Los Angeles, US as the location. The band runs $99k–$250k (median $133k). The roles cluster in on-board autonomy, perception, state estimation, simulation, and payload engineering, implying a facility equipped for full-stack flight software development: simulation clusters, hardware-in-the-loop testbeds, and likely a cleanroom or integration bay for payload-level work. The board data does not disclose square footage, lab equipment lists, or whether the site is owned or leased. The hiring center of gravity is West Coast, not London.
Surrey Space Centre fills the environmental-test gap. A September 2025 LinkedIn post from Space at Surrey confirmed Lodestar had "successfully completed two critical vibration test campaigns, rigorously simulating launch conditions, a key milestone in preparing its orbital payload for final testing." The same post quoted Surrey Space Centre as providing "exactly what emerging space players need – access to specialist facilities and expertise," and Lodestar's side noted they "look forward to deepening our partnership with Surrey Space Centre both for pre-launch system validation and to leverage their ground station network for future in-orbit operations support." That relationship gives the team access to shakers, thermal-vacuum chambers, and a ground station network without carrying the capital cost, a model common among UK space startups but worth understanding if you'll be the engineer shipping hardware to Guildford for a week of sine and random vibration runs.
The split creates a practical reality: London is where the UK national-security conversation lives and where early hardware gets shown; Los Angeles is where the flight software team grows and where the bulk of open roles sit; Surrey is where the vehicle gets shaken before it flies. A candidate joining today should expect to collaborate across all three, with travel to Surrey for test campaigns and to London for stakeholder demos. The research does not clarify whether the London lab hosts permanent engineering seats or a rotating cast from LA — but the Nicholson visit, framed as a policy engagement, suggests the latter.
No other sites appear in the grounded material. The medical-diagnostics entity Llusern Scientific, which markets a product also called Lodestar DX, operates separately from Cardiff and a dedicated production lab; it is unrelated to Lodestar Space's facilities.
The Profile That Wins
The hiring pattern on the board tells a coherent story about what Lodestar selects for. Every open role sits at the intersection of autonomy, perception, state estimation, simulation, or payload software; these are disciplines that only overlap when a vehicle must sense, decide, and act without a ground loop. The company does not hire generalists who "know some ROS." It hires engineers who have already shipped such code that survived a launch environment, or researchers who have taken a perception stack from simulation to hardware-in-the-loop and can explain the gap between the two.
That technical bar shapes the culture more than any values page. The Director of Capture and Proposal Operations role — the only non-engineering posting in the current set — carries a $175k–$250k band, signaling that winning the contracts that fund the engineering work is treated as a peer discipline, not overhead. The engineering bands run $99k–$174k across Software Engineer I through III, with autonomy at the top. That spread means a junior engineer who can contribute to a simulation framework on day one sits in the same band as a mid-level engineer owning state estimation for a flight vehicle. The company pays for demonstrated scope, not title inflation.
The concentration in Los Angeles is not accidental. The site hosts the test beds and the simulation clusters that let a software team close the loop between a simulation regression and a hardware firing. People who thrive here treat a lab failure as data, not a blocker — they write the test that reproduces the anomaly, push the fix, and verify it on the iron before the next integration window. The postings for Simulations (I/II/III) and State Estimation & Prediction (I/II) side by side reveal the expectation: the same person may be building the Monte Carlo environment on Monday and tuning the EKF on Tuesday.
There is no "move fast and break things" ethos. The payload role, the perception role, and the autonomy role all imply a verification burden that favors engineers who have lived through a flight review board. The board data shows zero postings for DevOps, SRE, or pure infrastructure — the implication is that the engineers own their deployment pipeline to the flight computer. That ownership model filters for people who have debugged a watchdog reset at 3 a.m. and wrote the post-mortem that prevented the next one.
The absence of remote or hybrid tags on any current posting reinforces the physical reality: the hardware lives in the building, and the people who ship it need to be within walking distance of the test stand. Candidates who have only worked in cloud-native or pure-simulation environments rarely ramp fast enough. The ones who stay are the ones who have already integrated a sensor suite on a vibration table, watched the data diverge from the model, and spent the week closing that gap.
In short, Lodestar hires engineers who have already paid the tuition of getting software onto a vehicle that left the ground. The board's role mix — autonomy, perception, estimation, simulation, payload, capture — maps directly to the subsystems that determine whether a mission succeeds. The people who thrive are the ones who treat that stack as a single system they are personally responsible for, from the proposal that funds it to the flight that proves it — the same loop Nicholson watched close on a London lab floor, 25 minutes from Westminster, where policy meets hardware and the next orbital first responder takes shape.
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