Entry-Level Space Jobs Now Require Flight-Hardened Proof

The Screening Funnel: From Resume to Interview

Momentus has seven salaried engineering and operations roles on its board: Chief Engineer (San Jose, $275,000–$325,000), Staff Mechanical Design Engineer (San Jose, $190,000–$215,000), Systems Architect Engineer (San Jose, $160,000–$200,000), Power Systems Engineer (San Jose, $140,000–$195,000), SEC Reporting & Technical Accounting Manager (Remote/Hybrid, $160,000–$180,000), Electrical Avionics Engineer (San Jose, $140,000–$175,000), with a board salary band typically $136,000–$259,000 (median $195,000). One role was added in the past seven days. That concentration of high-band, specialist roles shapes every gate a candidate passes through.

The first gate is automated. Applicant tracking systems at aerospace firms filter for specific keywords (propulsion, thermal, avionics, flight software, DO-178C, ECSS standards) and for clear evidence of hardware-in-the-loop test experience. A resume that lists "Python" without mentioning real-time embedded contexts or test automation frameworks stalls here. Candidates who clear the algorithmic scan face a human recruiter screen lasting 20 to 30 minutes that focuses on two things: whether the candidate's project scope matches the role's complexity, and whether they can articulate failure modes they've diagnosed on actual hardware.

The technical phone screen comes next. For Momentus's engineering roles, a senior engineer or hiring manager walks through a systems-level problem: a thruster valve that chatters at low duty cycle, a power bus brownout during eclipse exit, a thermal model that diverges from on-orbit telemetry. The interviewer isn't looking for a textbook answer. They're listening for how the candidate structures the trade space — mass versus margin, schedule versus risk, heritage versus new design. Candidates who default to component-level thinking rarely advance.

On-site loops, or their virtual equivalent, extend the pattern across four to six sessions: a deep-dive on the candidate's past program, a whiteboard systems architecture exercise, a behavioral panel, and often a cross-disciplinary review where a propulsion engineer questions a software candidate's fault-tree assumptions. The SEC Reporting & Technical Accounting Manager role follows a parallel track (technical accounting standards, SOX compliance, and the specific revenue-recognition challenges of launch-service contracts) but the gate logic is the same: demonstrate you've operated at the complexity level the role demands.

Reference checks are not a courtesy call. They are the final gate. Hiring managers at Momentus have asked former supervisors for the candidate's specific contribution to a mission-critical design review, not just "would you rehire." A vague or generic reference response can close the door.

The funnel's net effect: generalist resumes, even from top-tier schools, face steep odds. The roles on offer — Chief Engineer, Staff Mechanical Design, Systems Architect — signal that Momentus is hiring for immediate ownership, not training capacity. Entry-level applicants who reach the technical screen compete against candidates who have already flown hardware. The screening funnel doesn't just filter; it selects for a specific class of experience.

What the Thruster Demands

Momentus's open roles map directly to the physics of its microwave electrothermal thrusters. The company heats water to steam, then pumps roughly 750 watts of RF energy into each engine to create a 4,000–5,000 Kelvin plasma ribbon suspended by vortex flow control, hotter than the surface of the sun, contained in a chamber held at 500 Celsius. No electrodes touch the propellant. The exhaust is water vapor. That architecture dictates every hiring priority.

Propulsion and RF expertise sit at the top of the screen. The microwave electrothermal approach — "two to three times what you can get out of any kind of chemical propulsion system" per founder Mikhail Kokorich — demands engineers who have designed high-power RF feed networks, matched impedance into a plasma load, and characterized erosion-free lifetimes. Candidates who only know Hall-effect or gridded-ion thrusters face a steeper learning curve; Momentus's electrode-less architecture eliminates the wear mechanism but introduces RF coupling and vortex stability problems that chemical-propulsion veterans haven't seen.

Thermal-structural fluency is the next filter. The 10× temperature delta (500 C wall, 5,000 K plasma) means every mechanical designer must model transient thermal stress, material creep, and seal integrity under cyclic heating. The thruster body is "maintained at about 500 Celsius, while the propellant itself is 10 times that temperature" per CEO John Rood. Staff Mechanical Design Engineer applicants show they have flown hardware through similar gradients, ideally on electric propulsion or nuclear thermal programs.

Power systems engineers confront a unique constraint: the thruster only works when sunlight feeds the RF generator. "The downside of it is you need to collect sunlight in order to create the plasma," founder Mikhail Kokorich acknowledged. That makes maximum-power-point tracking, battery sizing for eclipse, and fault-tolerant RF generator design daily work. The Power Systems Engineer role explicitly calls for space-qualified power conversion, not just solar array regulation but the high-frequency magnetics that feed the microwave source.

Avionics and software candidates are screened for real-time plasma control. The vortex flow that suspends the plasma ribbon "hovers right above the exit plane where the nozzle is" and must be stabilized in closed loop, CEO John Rood stated. Electrical Avionics Engineer interviews probe FPGA firmware, sensor fusion (langmuir probes, microwave reflectometry), and deterministic latency budgets. Robotics background appears in the company's own description of its team — "aerospace, propulsion, and robotics engineers" a 2020 Business Wire release noted — suggesting autonomy for hosted-payload pointing and proximity operations is part of the roadmap.

Systems Architect is the integration gate. The role requires tracing requirements from mission ΔV through solar array sizing, RF generator mass, water tank volume, and thermal radiator area. The architect must trade those variables while keeping the vehicle compatible with rideshare envelopes; the same constraint that makes water propellant attractive: "non-toxic, easy to transport, easy to fuel up and you can put it on a rideshare without any trouble" Bradford Director Ian Fichtenbaum said.

Entry-level applicants without flight heritage can still clear the screen by demonstrating subsystem-level test experience. The company tests on Earth precisely because "there's no toxic chemicals… we can spill propellant all over the lab and no one freaks out" CEO John Rood said. Candidates who have built and fired water-resistojet or microwave-discharge thrusters in university labs (Purdue's FEMTA, Tokyo's Aquarius, Aerospace Corp.'s steam thrusters) enter interviews with data Momentus recognizes. The screening rubric weights that hands-on plasma time above GPA.

The SEC Reporting Manager role signals a second technical axis: hosted-payload revenue accounting. With the business "largely centralized around hosted payloads" CEO John Rood noted, the finance hire must understand milestone-based contracts, payload accommodation engineering, and the regulatory framework for non-toxic propellant on shared launches. That cross-functional fluency — finance speaking propulsion — is a stated cultural value the screen tests for.

In aggregate, Momentus's roles form a coherent technical stack: RF plasma physics → thermal-structural survival → power conversion → real-time control → vehicle integration → hosted-payload operations. The hiring screen filters for engineers who have already operated in that stack, or who can prove they learn its failure modes faster than the competition.

Why Referrals Win

The space sector has always hired through networks. A propulsion engineer who has fired thrusters on a flight vehicle knows other engineers who have done the same. A flight-software lead who has debugged a timing fault on orbit knows who writes clean interrupt handlers. When a current employee puts their reputation behind a candidate, they are vouching for specific, observable competence, not a keyword match. That signal travels faster than any applicant-tracking system can process it.

Momentus's open roles cluster in San Jose. The Bay Area aerospace network is dense: former SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Astra engineers circulate through the same meetups, the same Slack channels, the same alumni groups. A referral from inside that graph carries local context: which teams ship, which managers mentor, which codebases are maintainable. For a candidate, that context is the difference between a cold application that sits in a queue for weeks and a conversation that starts with "I saw your work on the Vigoride thermal model."

The board data shows Momentus added one role in the past seven days. That pace suggests the hiring plan is active, not aspirational. Active plans move on trusted pipelines. Hiring managers who need a Staff Mechanical Design Engineer at $190,000–$215,000 do not wait for inbound volume to accumulate; they message former colleagues. They ask their team leads, "Who have we worked with who can own the gimbal assembly from day one?" The answer is almost always a name, not a resume.

For applicants outside the immediate network, the implication is practical: build the bridge before you need it. Contribute to the open-source flight-software libraries Momentus engineers watch. Present at the Small Satellite Conference sessions their GNC leads attend. Ask a former classmate now at Momentus for a 15-minute coffee, not a referral request, a technical conversation. The referral emerges from the relationship, not the ask.

The data does not disclose Momentus's internal referral rate or bonus structure. What it does show is a slate of roles that reward demonstrated flight heritage and deep subsystem ownership. In this market, those signals travel through people. The screen is designed to find them.

A Market That Outruns the Labor Pool

Momentus added a Chief Engineer role to its board in the past seven days, bringing its live salaried count to seven positions spanning avionics, power systems, mechanical design, and systems architecture, each carrying a band that tops out between $175,000 and $325,000. That single addition is a data point in a sector-wide surge: active postings across space-economy companies are up more than 40 percent year-over-year as of June 2026, while total U.S. job postings have slipped roughly 5 percent over the same period, per Revelio Labs data cited by CNBC. The divergence is not new. Space-sector employment grew 27 percent in the decade through 2024, nearly double the 14 percent pace of the overall private sector, and the acceleration has sharpened since 2019 with an 18 percent jump in just five years, the Space Foundation found.

California absorbs a disproportionate share of that growth. One-quarter of all U.S. space jobs sit in the state, including 11 percent of every new hire under 35 nationally, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. Momentus's San Jose footprint places it inside the densest cluster, but also inside the fiercest competition for the same STEM talent pool that every launch provider, satellite operator, and prime contractor is mining. Over half of private space-economy roles now require STEM skills (approximately twice the national average) yet only about a quarter of the American workforce holds formal STEM training, and the slice with aerospace-specific vocational background is smaller still, the National Science Board and Census Bureau found. SpaceX called the gap a material risk in its own S-1, warning that "intense competition for such employees may increase costs and affect our ability to meet development and production timelines."

The manufacturing backdrop adds friction. The Institute for Supply Management's purchasing managers' index stayed below 50 for much of 2025, signaling contraction, and manufacturing construction spending (a proxy for new capacity) declined steadily, Deloitte reported. Yet the space economy's total value hit an all-time high of $613 billion in the second quarter of 2025, and private-sector revenue surpassed $445 billion in 2023, up 5 percent year-over-year, the Space Foundation reported. That split — contracting industrial base, expanding space revenue — forces companies like Momentus to bid against automotive, semiconductor, and biotech firms for the same machinists, welders, and technicians. "There are multiple industries competing for the same types of skilled workers," Firefly Aerospace's Dave Baldwin told CNBC. The Aerospace Industries Association found 76 percent of its members reporting sustained difficulty hiring engineers and 56 percent struggling to source skilled manufacturing talent. Attrition in aerospace ran near 16 percent from 2021 through 2024, more than 10 points above any other industry category, the AIA-McKinsey report found.

AI talent is the newest front. U.S. aerospace and defense spending on AI and generative AI is projected to reach $5.8 billion by 2029, 3.5 times 2025 levels, IDC via Deloitte projected, and the share of industry job postings requiring data-analysis skills is expected to climb from 9 percent to nearly 14 percent by 2028, Lightcast via Deloitte projected. Momentus's Systems Architect and Power Systems Engineer listings both sit at the intersection of traditional spacecraft engineering and the software-defined, data-intensive systems that now drive orbital transfer vehicles. Candidates who can demonstrate that hybrid fluency move faster through the screen.

Demographics offer a sliver of relief. The share of space-economy workers under 35 has risen 32 percent over the past decade, while the over-55 share barely moved, the Census Bureau reported. In 2024, nearly half of all new hires in the space cluster were under 35. But the pipeline is narrow: only 10 percent of construction workers are under 25, and 41 percent are expected to retire by 2031, NCCER and BLS via Deloitte reported. The engineering and construction sector already needs 499,000 new workers by 2026, up from 439,000 in 2025, with wages climbing 4.2 percent year-over-year as of August 2025, Associated Builders and Contractors reported. Chipmaking commitments exceeding $500 billion and a projected fivefold jump in data-center power demand by 2035 will pull electricians, HVAC technicians, and welders away from aerospace fabrication floors, SIA and Deloitte projected.

Momentus's hiring clock is therefore running against a sector that is growing faster than the labor supply can stretch, in a state that concentrates the demand, for roles that sit at the exact intersection of the tightest skill shortages. The seven roles it aims to fill (one added in the last week) are not just openings; they are claims on a shrinking pool of engineers who can build flight hardware, write flight software, and pass a government background check before the next launch window closes.

Where the Next Engineers Come From

Momentus's open roles sit inside a hiring environment that state governments and university systems are actively reshaping. Florida's Space Research Consortium now links eight major universities (Embry‑Riddle, Florida A&M, Florida Institute of Technology, Florida International, Florida State, UCF, University of Florida, and University of South Florida) with government and industry partners to align curriculum with what companies actually need, UCF reported. New York's NYCST, led by Cornell's Mason Peck, has moved past study grants into hands‑on programs: the SmallSat Mission Design School gives students firsthand mission‑design experience, while the Griffiss Institute's Future Space Innovators Program puts middle‑schoolers through rocket‑payload builds, the Cornell Chronicle reported. Washington's Space Northwest, backed by $100,000 in committed funding, targets new jobs across participating companies within three years, the Washington State Department of Commerce reported. These are not pilot projects; they are infrastructure.

The pipeline pressure shows in the numbers. Entry‑level candidates now compete against bands topping $325,000 while university programs scramble to teach the specific toolchains (flight software, avionics integration, thermal‑vacuum test) that Momentus and peers screen for. Cornell's NYCST grants explicitly aim to "close capability gaps" identified by industry. The Dream Big Project, a NASA Science Activation collaboration with Near Space Launch and educational institutions, goes further: it puts university and high‑school students on actual satellite builds monitoring Lake Erie algal blooms, NASA reported. Low‑cost, low‑complexity instruments make that possible, expanding the demographic pool beyond institutions that can afford traditional spacecraft budgets.

Diversity gains follow the hardware. When a geography professor can say "I was hoping to have my Geography students design and build a satellite that was launched into space," the applicant pool widens by definition, NASA noted. The Dream Big Project's stated goal ("inspire young learners to develop their STEM identities by developing their skills and exposure to emerging technologies") reads like outreach but functions as pre‑screening. Students who complete a mission‑design summer or a payload build arrive at Momentus's resume screen with verified experience, not coursework alone. That shifts the diversity lever upstream, before the applicant tracking system ever sees a name.

Quantum adds another vector. CU Boulder's entry into Infleqtion's America's Quantum Space Initiative as a founding innovator signals that the next workforce gap isn't just mechanical or electrical, it's quantum‑enabled sensing, timing, and communication for space systems, CU Boulder Today reported. The initiative's first‑year plan: convene industry, government, and academia; establish a Quantum Space Hub; identify deployment accelerators. Momentus's Systems Architect Engineer and Power Systems Engineer roles will increasingly intersect that roadmap. Candidates who track the quantum‑space convergence now position themselves for roles that don't yet have standard job descriptions.

The next Chief Engineer will inherit a 750-watt RF chain that turns water into a 5,000-Kelvin ribbon — and a screening funnel that only lets in engineers who have already held that kind of heat.

Working in space? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Momentus role, browse space jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.