Principal Dynamics Engineer

K2 is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, unlocking performance levels previously out of reach across every orbit. Backed by over $1 billion in total funding from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and T. Rowe Price — and with over $1 billion in signed contracts across commercial and US government customers, we're mass-producing the highest-power satellite platforms ever built for missions from LEO to deep space.

The rise of heavy-lift launch vehicles is shifting the industry from an era of mass constraint to one of mass abundance, and we believe this new era demands a fundamentally different class of spacecraft. Engineered to survive the harshest radiation environments and to fully capitalize on today's and tomorrow's massive rockets, K2 satellites deliver unmatched capability at constellation scale and across multiple orbits.

With multiple launches in 2027 and plans to scale to 100 satellites a year, we're Building Bigger — helping develop the solar system and build toward a Kardashev Type II (K2) civilization. If you are a motivated individual who thrives in a fast-paced environment and you're excited about contributing to the success of a high-growth Series D-funded company, we'd love for you to apply.

As a technical leader on our growing dynamics team, you will own the successful derivation of loads and environments for K2 Space satellites during ground transportation, launch, deployment, and on-orbit operation. You will build software tools and establish simulation workflows to support a variety of analyses in frequency and time domains. Within your first couple of months, you will devise development testing to correlate physics models with measured data. You will also own qualification and acceptance testing of satellite hardware at the component and vehicle level. As we continue to refine our designs and scale for the future, you will set technical direction, mentor junior engineers, and deliver well-derived requirements and engineering insights to make reliable and mass-producible spacecraft.

• Drive the definition and execution of dynamic testing at the component, subsystem, vehicle, and stack level, including test planning and coordination, test analysis, and model correlation

• Lead innovation on cross-disciplinary analysis and test methodologies

• Own and evolve spacecraft dynamics approaches to optimize for the company’s business

• Develop time- and frequency-domain physics models using finite element analysis (e.g., Nastran) and custom-built software (e.g., Python), and set technical direction for shared analysis tooling, including version control and continuous-integration practices for analysis and test-data pipelines

• Create software tools to support data processing and simulation frameworks

• Collaborate with design engineers, analysts, and external customers to develop payload products

• Apply first principles in developing frameworks for both dynamics and non-dynamics analyses

• Lead code reviews for simulation and analysis tools

• Utilize analysis and test to provide data-driven engineering guidance and decisions

• Write high quality technical documentation of tests and simulations

• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior and mid-level dynamics engineers, contributing to the growth of the analysis team

• Derive loads, environments, and other dynamics-driven design and test criteria for payload and hardware teams, including vibration, shock, and jitter maximum predicted environments and response-limit derivation (e.g., NASA 7004C), and develop new response-limiting methodologies