Who gets hired and onto which teams
Vast's leadership bench reads like a space-industry all-star team: cryptocurrency founder Jed McCaleb, former NASA astronauts Garrett Reisman and Andrew Feustel, and a roster of SpaceX alumni including Hans Koenigsmann. In three years they have grown the company from 20 to over 600 employees. This guide maps Vast's hiring picture (compensation, interview process, site capabilities, and the profile that lasts) so candidates can decide fit and prepare.
The answer starts with the mission. McCaleb founded Vast in 2021 to build artificial-gravity stations, spinning structures large enough to keep human physiology intact during long-duration stays. He put the stakes plainly in 2022: "Vast will live or die on the quality of its engineering team." That framing has dictated every hiring wave since. The early headcount was dense with SpaceX experience: Kyle Dedmon (construction and facilities), Tom Hayford (systems engineering), Molly McCormick (human factors), Colin Smith (propulsion), and Koenigsmann as adviser. When Vast acquired Launcher in February 2023, the workforce tripled overnight, SpaceNews reported. Max Haot, Launcher's founder, brought roughly 80 engineers and became president, then CEO. The combined organization moved into a new Long Beach headquarters that summer.
Today the company reports 606-plus employees as of October 2024, with BuiltIn LA counting 655 and the careers page citing "1000+ experts." The organizational chart reveals the team structure. At the top sit a founder-chair (McCaleb), a CEO (Haot), a COO (Kris Young), and a Chief People Officer (Karin Kuo). Below them, senior vice presidents own discrete programs: Jim Martz runs Special Projects, Colin Smith leads the Haven-1 program, Eric Massey owns Software and Avionics, and Kyle Dedmon oversees Operations. Vice presidents cover Propulsion (Mark Groskreutz), Flight Dynamics & GNC (Sergei Tanygin), Avionics (Randy Huang), Mission Operations (Derek Hassmann), Flight Safety & Mission Assurance (Marcos Simon), Manufacturing (Shane Cioni), and Ground Software & Mission Systems (Benjamin Leeds). Molly McCormick holds a Principal Engineer seat. Special Programs, a newer division, is led by Melanie Stricklan, former CEO of Slingshot Aerospace. Satellite business development, crew partnerships, mission management, policy, security, and communications each have a VP. A European entity operates under Giorgio Saccoccia; a Japanese entity under Naoko Yamazaki.
That hierarchy maps directly to hiring needs. Propulsion, GNC, avionics, structures, thermal, life support, and software are not abstract categories — they are the org chart. The job board confirms it: recent postings include a Senior CNC Programmer in Hawthorne, a Senior/Staff Build Reliability Engineer (Integration) in Long Beach, and a Structures Design Reliability Engineer in Long Beach. Manufacturing roles sit alongside flight software and mission operations. The advisor bench (Kathy Lueders, Steve Isakowitz, Alex Hudson, Will Heltsley, Peter Russell-Clarke, Clay Mowry) adds NASA, Aerospace Corporation, and defense-industry perspective that shapes requirements down to the requisition level.
Two former astronauts, Reisman and Feustel, serve as human spaceflight advisers. Megan McArthur, Sunita Williams, and Yamazaki round out the astronaut roster. Their presence is not ceremonial; they define crew interfaces, habitability standards, and mission profiles that engineers must meet. That trickles into hiring for human factors, EVA systems, and medical operations, roles that do not exist at a typical launch-vehicle company.
The Launcher acquisition added Orbiter, an orbital transfer vehicle, and the E-2 engine program. Launcher Light was shelved — "We have to focus," Haot said — but the propulsion and vehicle teams stayed. That means Vast hires for both station and transfer-vehicle development in parallel. Partnerships with AnySignal, TRL11, Addvalue, and SpaceX Starlink for Haven-1 communications create demand for RF, networking, and ground-systems specialists. The Haven-2 roadmap — four modules by 2030, a Starship-launched core, a proliferated fleet by the 2040s — extends the hiring horizon into large-scale production and multi-mission operations.
Three offices (Hawthorne, Long Beach, and an international footprint) reflect the split between legacy Launcher manufacturing, the new HQ integration floor, and government-facing teams in Europe and Japan. Candidates should expect to interview into a specific VP-led pillar, not a generic "engineering pool." The org chart is the map, and it dictates what Vast pays.
Pay bands
Vast's compensation data on our board clusters around a $78,000–$265,000 annual base range with a $195,000 median across 145 salaried roles, figures that reflect the company's Long Beach, California headquarters and its current hiring mix. The postings themselves tell a more granular story. Every live listing on the board as of this writing sits at the Director or senior individual-contributor level, and all are tied to the Long Beach site.
| Role | Location | Base Salary Range (USD/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Director, Fluid Systems Test | Long Beach, CA | $203,360 – $288,672 |
| Director, Sub Assemblies Manufacturing | Long Beach, CA | $188,660 – $267,720 |
| Mission Assurance Engineer | Long Beach, CA | $159,900 – $267,720 |
| Director, Satellite Engineering | Long Beach, CA | $188,600 – $267,720 |
| Director, Mission Engineering & Management | Long Beach, CA | $188,600 – $267,720 |
| Director, Loads & Dynamics | Long Beach, CA | $188,600 – $267,700 |
The spread is tight. Five of the six Director roles share a nearly identical floor ($188,600–$188,660) and ceiling ($267,700–$267,720), according to Zero G Talent's board, standardizing the band for that title. Fluid Systems Test sits higher — roughly $15,000 more at the top — aligning with the premium typically attached to propulsion and fluid-systems expertise in launch-vehicle and station programs. Mission Assurance Engineer, the lone non-Director listing, spans a wider band ($159,900–$267,720), mapping the role to multiple internal levels or variable equity upside.
These numbers are base salary only. Vast does not publish equity or bonus detail in its public postings, and our board captures what the company discloses. Industry-wide, base tends to sit in a narrow band while equity refreshers and sign-on bonuses carry 30–50% flexibility, according to 2026 compensation data from ophyai.com. Recruiters at frontier tech companies, Vast included, typically quote the midpoint to start, and candidates who anchor at the 75th percentile with competing offers tend to close higher.
Context matters. The ophyai.com 2026 survey puts a Senior Software Engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area at a $380,000–$705,000 total-compensation P50, while a tier-2 U.S. market runs $220,000–$395,000. Long Beach tracks closer to the latter. Principal-level AI/ML roles at frontier labs now command $1.2 million–$3.0 million total comp, but Vast's current openings are hardware- and systems-heavy, fluid systems, loads and dynamics, satellite engineering, not ML-centric. That keeps its bands in the aerospace Director tier rather than the AI-lab stratosphere.
A caveat: the board's 145-role sample skews senior. Junior and mid-level engineering, technician, and operations roles exist at Vast (the company employs several hundred people) but they are not currently advertised on our board. The $78,000 floor likely captures early-career or non-exempt positions that simply aren't posted here; candidates targeting those levels should research Southern California aerospace entry-level benchmarks.
Negotiation leverage comes from competing offers, not threats. The research is consistent: stack offers, negotiate equity and sign-on first, and time the conversation after a competing offer is in hand. Vast's standardized Director bands mean base movement is limited; the upside lives in the equity component, which is not public. Ask for the grant size, vesting schedule, and refresh policy, those are the variables that move the needle. But compensation is only half the gate; the interview loop is the other.
Inside the interview loop
Glassdoor hosts three distinct Vast interview collections totaling 87 unique questions and 93 anonymous candidate reviews, enough signal to sketch the outline of a process, but not enough to publish a stage-by-stage playbook with confidence. The largest set (42 questions, 45 reviews) and a second collection (37 questions, 40 reviews) suggest a consistent pattern across engineering and non-engineering tracks; a smaller eight-review set may reflect a specific site or function. None of the reviews in the research digest break down the exact sequence of screens, technical assessments, or onsite panels, so what follows synthesizes the available evidence rather than inventing a flowchart.
Vast's own careers messaging emphasizes a "bottom-up engineering and first principles-led approach where we are empowered to make decisions, own the outcomes, and collaborate." That language — repeated on the company site — functions as a cultural filter: candidates who frame past work around ownership, first-principles reasoning, and cross-functional collaboration align with the stated values before a recruiter ever screens a résumé. The same page stresses passion for space and "desire to do important work," which in practice means interviewers probe for genuine mission alignment, not just technical checkboxes.
The breadth of roles, spanning the compensation bands detailed above, implies multiple interview calibrations: a senior director track will include leadership and strategy sessions that an individual-contributor engineering loop does not. Vast's headcount trajectory (Haven-1 integration, Haven-2 design, CLD Phase 2 bid) suggests a multi-stage cadence similar to other hardware-rich space companies.
No published rubric, known "bar-raiser" role, or fixed timeline from application to offer appears in the research. Candidates should treat the Glassdoor question bank as a study guide but prepare for role-specific deviations. The strongest applications in this environment lead with quantified hardware results (test campaigns flown, mass margins closed, review boards passed), cite first-principles trade studies they authored, and explicitly connect past work to Haven-1's published milestones: primary structure qualification, flight-computer EMI testing, life-support module validation, and solar-array acceptance inspection. The process tests for the hardware fluency that the Long Beach campus is built to exercise.
Where the work happens
Vast operates from a single major campus in Long Beach, California, where it has consolidated headquarters, manufacturing, and most ground-test capabilities under one roof. The company describes the site as a recently completed build-out of "headquarters and space station manufacturing facilities", a phrase that undersells the density of flight-hardware activity now concentrated there. Two Haven-1 primary structures, the qualification article and the flight article, sat side by side in the Long Beach high bay as of the latest public updates, both built in-house. That high bay is where final weld inspections, integration, and acceptance inspection of the twelve deployable solar-array wings (each rated at 1.1 kW, 13.2 kW total) take place. The same floor hosts the semi-anechoic chamber where the Vast Control Unit — Haven-1's flight computer — undergoes electromagnetic-compatibility verification, the life-support testing module where full-scale environmental control and life-support systems are run through mission profiles, and a thermal-vacuum chamber used for component-level thermal-vacuum simulation. Fan assemblies, cold plates, oxygen-system trays, battery modules, control-moment gyroscopes, solenoid-valve assemblies, and MMOD shielding sub-assemblies all progress through inspection and test stations in the same building before moving toward flight integration.
A second site, in Mojave, California, handles pressure and load acceptance testing for the primary structure, hatch, and domed window, the only major campaign that regularly leaves Long Beach. The qualification article completed that campaign in Mojave before returning to Long Beach for final weld inspections and integration. Domed-window outdoor testing and kick-test validation also occur at Mojave, leveraging the site's large-scale structural test stands. The split is deliberate: Long Beach is optimized for rapid iteration on sub-systems and full-station integration; Mojave provides the heavy structural-test infrastructure that does not yet exist at the headquarters campus.
No evidence shows additional Vast-operated sites. All first-party job postings on the Zero G Talent board list Long Beach, California, United States as the work location, and public communications consistently refer to "Vast HQ" or "Vast headquarters in Long Beach" as the locus of manufacturing, integration, and ground simulation. For a candidate, this means day-to-day work, whether in structures, avionics, life support, GNC, or mission operations, centers on the Long Beach campus, with travel to Mojave limited to test campaigns. The concentration of capability in one facility also means cross-discipline visibility is high. The campus concentrates the work; the profile determines who stays.
The profile that lasts
Vast's hiring signals point to a specific profile: engineers and operators who have built flight hardware, managed risk on tight schedules, and operated inside the overlapping constraints of commercial speed and NASA-grade safety. The company's public communications, its mission page, milestone announcements, and leadership hires, consistently emphasize three interlocking traits: hardware fluency, iterative discipline, and commercial ownership.
The hardware signal is unambiguous. Haven-1's primary structure is the first U.S.-built space station flight article in over twenty years, and it is the third major structure Vast has completed in two years. Manufacturing began in November 2023 explicitly to "establish the necessary tooling, team, and processes for Haven-1." That phrasing, tooling, team, processes, appears on the website's updates page as a triplet, and it maps directly to the roles Vast posts: Director, Sub Assemblies Manufacturing; Director, Fluid Systems Test; Mission Assurance Engineer; Director, Loads & Dynamics. These are not abstract architecture roles. They are positions for people who have welded pressure vessels, qualified fluid systems, and written test plans that survive vibration and thermal vacuum. The board's salary bands, director-level roles clustering in the $188k–$268k range, reflect the scarcity of engineers who have taken hardware from drawing to ship-set.
Iterative discipline shows up in the company's self-described "progressive complexity" strategy. Vast leadership has stated the goal is to "launch early and demonstrate safe, reliable operations before NASA selects one or more commercial platforms." That sentence compresses two distinct mindsets: the startup instinct to ship a minimum viable product, and the aerospace instinct to never break the crew. People who thrive here have lived in that tension, preferably on programs that flew. The Haven Demo mission, deployed from the Bandwagon-4 rideshare in November 2025 and deorbited in February 2026, was a deliberate risk-reduction step. Candidates who treat flight heritage as a checkbox rather than a teacher tend to wash out in the technical screens.
Commercial ownership is the third leg. CEO Max Haot has contrasted Vast's platform with government-owned stations on three specific freedoms: communication, manufacturing goods for sale on Earth, and ownership of intellectual property created aboard. The company's stated revenue model, drug and semiconductor development in microgravity paying for station operations, means every engineer is effectively on a product team. The hire of Melanie Stricklan, former CEO of Slingshot Aerospace and a U.S. Air Force veteran, to lead a new Special Programs Division, and Steve Isakowitz, former CEO of The Aerospace Corporation and a NASA executive, as an advisor, signals that Vast values people who speak both commercial and government fluently. They need engineers who can write a requirements document that satisfies a NASA CLD milestone and a business case that closes for a pharmaceutical customer.
The long-term vision, artificial gravity stations "allowing humanity to live and work in space without long-term harm to the body", acts as a filter. It attracts people motivated by a generational problem, but the day-to-day work is grinding integration: pressure and load testing, docking adapter fit checks, solar array deployment verification (DHV Technology panels, 1.1 kW each, 13.2 kW peak). The Haven-1 integration updates, "fully welded," "pressure and load testing complete," "integration begins", read like a build log. The people who last are the ones who read those updates and see their own last six months.
In short: Vast hires builders who have shipped flight hardware, operators who have managed risk on fixed launch dates, and engineers who can translate a NASA milestone into a work package without losing the commercial thread. The company's communications publish a build log. The values are in the milestones. The leadership bench that walked into Long Beach in 2021 has become a factory that ships flight hardware. The next milestone, Haven-1's launch, will be the first test of whether the profile they've hired for can sustain a station program. The build log keeps growing.
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