Who gets hired
Solestial, now a York Space Systems subsidiary, listed 12 openings as of September 2026, every one tied to a production line building radiation-self-healing silicon solar cells at its Tempe, Arizona factory. The company's hiring filter emphasizes demonstrated fabrication experience. Candidates who can put a test report, a traveler, or a failure-analysis write-up on the table advance; those who cannot, do not.
The solar array powering a satellite constellation doesn't assemble itself. Solestial builds ultra-thin silicon solar cells that self-cure radiation damage — a trick that promises up to a decade in low Earth orbit at a fraction of traditional cost. That promise lives on a manufacturing line, not a whiteboard.
As of September 2026, the company lists 12 open roles on its careers page, up two from a month earlier. Engineering holds four; trades and field roles, three; operations, two; "other," two; sales, one. Seniority goes unlisted on 11 of 12 postings. Only one carries a "senior" tag. The two newest roles both sit in trades; the third in engineering.
The Lever board sorts the workforce into six pillars: Engineering, Operations, Product & Programs, Production, Sales & Marketing, and Tooling & R&D. The live postings tell a tighter story. Zero G Talent's feed, pulled straight from Solestial's careers page, shows six active listings, every one tied to the Tempe facility. They read like a factory ramp: Facilities & Equipment Technician, night-shift Process Technician for solar cell manufacturing, Process Engineer for module manufacturing and integration, Supply Chain Specialist (Buyer/Planner), Solar Module Manufacturing Manager, and Chemical Process Engineer. Not one carries "remote" in the title. The lone exception company-wide is a remote Business Development Manager, still anchored to the Tempe address.
Engineering splits between process and chemical disciplines — roles that live on the line, not in simulation. The Solar Module Manufacturing Manager sits above them, accountable for throughput and first-pass yield across shifts.
Trades and field roles are the line. The night-shift Process Technician runs the tools the process engineers qualify. The Facilities & Equipment Technician keeps vacuum systems, chillers, and gas delivery running. These roles require documented maintenance logs, PLC troubleshooting, and the ability to qualify a tool after preventive maintenance without vendor help.
Operations and supply chain round out the floor. The Supply Chain Specialist manages long-lead items that decide whether the line runs next month. The "other" bucket captures two additional roles.
Sales and marketing is a team of one: the remote Business Development Manager. Product & Programs and Tooling & R&D show no open requisitions, though the careers page mentions "refining our automation processes" in the lab. That language, combined with the Tooling & R&D pillar on Lever, signals automation hiring will follow the manufacturing baseline, not lead it.
For a candidate, the mapping is direct. If you have commissioned a thin-film deposition tool, qualified a cleanroom process, or kept a high-vacuum line running through a graveyard shift, there's an open lane. If your experience stops at simulation, modeling, or design reviews without a fabrication log, the current requisitions don't map to you. But the board publishes no pay bands for any of them.
What the roles pay
Solestial's compensation picture comes from three sources that don't align. The company's own board (Zero G Talent's first-party feed) lists six open roles at the Tempe facility. It publishes no salary bands for any of them.
Third-party aggregators fill the gap partially. Glassdoor reports 18 salary points across 10 roles, yielding a median total pay of about $114,000 for engineers, a figure blending base, bonus, and equity from a small sample of unclear vintage. Salary.com singles out the chief executive at $729,000 annually, an outlier that tells you nothing about the manufacturing and robotics roles driving headcount growth.
The disconnect matters. A candidate evaluating an offer for Process Engineer or Solar Module Manufacturing Manager has no public band to benchmark against. The company's hiring philosophy, filtering for demonstrated build-and-test experience over credentials, suggests pay should track proven capability, but the market data is too thin to confirm whether it does. York's June 2026 acquisition may introduce parent-company grading structures; until those roll out, the board's silence on bands is the only authoritative signal.
| Role | Location | Posted Band (Board) | Glassdoor Median (Engineers) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Facilities & Equipment Technician | Tempe, AZ | Not published | — | First-party board listing |
| Process Technician - Solar Cell Manufacturing (Night Shift) | Tempe, AZ | Not published | — | First-party board listing |
| Process Engineer - Solar Cell Module Manufacturing & Integration | Tempe, AZ | Not published | ~$114,000 (median, all engineers) | First-party board listing |
| Supply Chain Specialist - Buyer/Planner | Tempe, AZ | Not published | — | First-party board listing |
| Solar Module Manufacturing Manager | Tempe, AZ | Not published | — | First-party board listing |
| Chemical Process Engineer | Tempe, AZ | Not published | ~$114,000 (median, all engineers) | First-party board listing |
| Chief Executive Officer | Tempe, AZ | — | $729,000 (salary.com) | Single data point, not a band |
The table makes the gap visible. For every role the board advertises, the band column is empty. The Glassdoor median applies only in aggregate and carries a wide confidence interval. That screen is the first gate in a funnel built to move qualified manufacturing talent through quickly.
Inside the hiring funnel
A March 2024 Glassdoor review puts the end-to-end timeline at roughly two months from application to offer, with interviews conducted on-site in Tempe. Applications enter through Lever, where live requisitions list 10 to 12 open roles across six functions.
The Quality Manager requisition makes the bar explicit: five-plus years in high-reliability manufacturing (aerospace, defense, semiconductor, or automotive Tier 1), fluency with AS9100 and NASA-STD-8739, and direct experience with soldering, lamination, encapsulation, or thin-film deposition. The same standard applies downward to the night-shift Process Technician and Facilities & Equipment Technician roles.
Internships follow a compressed version of the same logic. The Solar Cell Characterization Intern and Solar Cell Metallization Modeling Intern postings require applicants to describe a lab project where they fabricated, measured, and iterated a device — not just simulated it.
The York Space Systems acquisition, closed June 4, 2026, adds a new variable: candidates who have worked in a vertically integrated satellite bus environment may enter the funnel with a measurable advantage. But the filter remains the same. Show the hardware. Show the data. Show the fix. Everything else is noise. That noise stays outside the building at 1121 West Warner Road.
The Tempe factory floor
Solestial operates out of a single 30,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 1121 West Warner Road in Tempe, Arizona, roughly half a football field under one roof. The building houses the entire wafer-to-module line: cell fabrication, metallization, module assembly, environmental test, and integration.
The facility has been automating and expanding since 2023. In 2026 the company installed advanced high-volume equipment to enable 100 percent U.S. wafer-to-module manufacturing, eliminating the last offshore process step and giving Solestial full control from ingot to flight-ready module. PV Magazine reported the footprint at 2,787 square meters (the same 30,000 square feet) and noted the automation push aimed at lowering cost and compressing lead times that have historically stretched to months for space-grade arrays.
Inside, the line runs from silicon wafer intake through the company's proprietary defect-engineered heterojunction process, then through metallization and lamination into flexible or rigid modules. The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission independently verified the low-temperature annealing behavior in 2023.
The integration floor handles module-to-substrate bonding and final mechanical and electrical checkout before shipment. Solestial works closely with the Vention team to enable fast iteration and seamless integration on the shop floor — critical when the target is a production sprint that can deliver nearly 2 kilowatts of cells in one week and ten customized 80-watt modules in the next, as the team demonstrated for a SpaceWERX D2P2 award.
Every current Zero G Talent posting lists the same address: the six open roles. All are Tempe-based. That concentration reflects a hiring model expecting engineers and technicians to walk the line daily, not manage it remotely. Meyer Burger's arrangement, producing cells in Germany and shipping them to Tempe for metallization, finishing, and module integration, further anchors the Arizona site as the integration and qualification hub for any partner-sourced material.
The facility's design supports the company's stated goal of scaling from today's megawatt-per-year capacity toward tens, then hundreds, then thousands of megawatts annually. For now, the Tempe building is where every flight unit gets built, tested, and signed off, and where the next hires will spend their time.
Who lasts
Every open role sits inside a production system actively being stood up, automated, and stress-tested against a backlog of customer demand the company has publicly acknowledged it cannot yet meet.
That backlog is the context. In the TechBriefs interview where founder Stan Herasimenka described the $17 million Series A close and his transition to CTO under new CEO Margo de Naray, he said: "We currently have more customer demand than we can fulfill." The response is a capital program focused on "implementing advanced automation, optimizing our supply chain, and developing robust quality control systems to enable high-volume, cost-effective production."
The technology itself selects for a specific cross-domain fluency. Solestial's cells are silicon, but not the silicon the terrestrial industry runs. They are radiation-hardened, ultrathin, flexible enough to spool around a 5-centimeter radius, and capable of annealing displacement damage at 65 °C — a self-healing mechanism that operates at normal on-orbit temperatures, unlike the high-temperature annealing legacy III-V cells require.
The cover glass is gone, replaced by polymer encapsulation. That packaging change ripples through every downstream step: handling, tabbing, laydown, lamination, inspection, environmental test.
Test culture is the filter. The company runs comprehensive in-house testing, simulating the harsh conditions of space, on a cadence tied to a manufacturing rhythm measured in months, not the years typical of III-V supply chains. Herasimenka noted Solestial's lead time is months compared to years for III-Vs.
Supply chain is a pacing item. The terrestrial silicon supply base is "vast, mature, and highly scalable," Herasimenka said, but the space-qualified slice of it is not. The Buyer/Planner role must source wafers, dopants, encapsulants, and polymer films that meet a radiation spec, then lock in allocation before the automation line hits rate.
The management layer reflects the same bias. The Solar Module Manufacturing Manager posting sits at the intersection of "advanced automation," "robust quality control," and "high-volume production" — three phrases from the company's own scaling narrative. The CTO's own move from CEO to chief technology officer signals that the technical risk (scaling a novel silicon architecture to constellation volumes) remains the company's primary constraint, and the organization is structured to keep decision-makers close to the hardware.
Geography reinforces the profile. The work happens at that address — a single campus housing the labs, test cells, machine shop, and integration floor. There is no remote option for core roles; the feedback loop between a process change on the line and data from the thermal-vacuum chamber is measured in walk-time.
The company's public record makes no secret of the ambition: "rapidly scaling operations is our top priority," and the Series A is described as "a critical step" toward "continuous access to capital" for "R&D, manufacturing expansion, and talent acquisition." The next 18 months will be defined by capital equipment installs, process transfers, first-article builds, and the inevitable yield cliffs that follow. The line at 1121 West Warner Road is not empty. The next hire walks in, puts a traveler on the table, and the loop closes again.
Working in space? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Solestial role, browse space jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.
