V

VAST

Develops artificial gravity space stations

Operations Engineer

Manufacturing EngineeringUpdated on Nov 10
Full-timeLong Beach, CA, USAIn-person

About the Job

Requirements

  • A bachelor's degree in Industrial, Manufacturing, Mechanical, or a related engineering discipline is required.
  • At least 1 year of professional or internship experience in a manufacturing environment is required.

Responsibilities

  • Design and own factory and production-area layouts, keeping floor plans and work-center configurations current with clear visual indicators and linear flow.
  • Lead future-state factory design and capacity planning to meet production-rate requirements as programs scale, partnering with stakeholders to meet business objectives.
  • Partner with area owners to evaluate layout options and space trade-offs, challenge footprint assumptions, and right-size work centers through an iterative design process.
  • Conduct regular production-line process walks, question workflows to identify opportunities to delete, simplify, or standardize work, determine root causes of operational challenges, and drive changes to completion.
  • Drive process standardization across products, assemblies, and work centers to reduce variability and capture best practices and lessons learned for sustainable production-rate scaling.
  • Develop dashboards and automated reporting tools that turn production and operations data into actionable insights on throughput, capacity, and delivery.
  • Define and track operational metrics that quantify production-system health and use them to drive efficiency improvements.
  • Execute complex projects with urgency while minimizing time and cost to the business, working hands-on and leading by example.

Desired Qualifications

  • Experience as an industrial, operations, or manufacturing engineer in a fast-paced developmental or early-production manufacturing environment, including exposure to ramping from development through rate production.
  • Demonstrated experience in factory layout design, capacity modeling, and process mapping.
  • Proficiency with CAD tools for layout and workspace design, such as SketchUp, AutoCAD, or equivalent.
  • Experience building dashboards or automated reports from production or operations data using tools such as Grafana, Tableau, Excel, SQL, and Python.
  • Experience with production and capacity-planning systems such as MRP, ERP, or MES.

About the Company

VAST

Develops artificial gravity space stations

Vast Space builds artificial gravity space stations to enable long-term human life in space. Its approach uses large rotating habitats that generate centrifugal force to mimic Earth's gravity, helping astronauts stay healthy during extended missions. The company designs, tests, demonstrates, services, and manufactures space infrastructure and customizable habitat modules for government space agencies, private aerospace companies, and research institutions that operate in lunar, Martian, or deep-space missions. Unlike others, Vast Space focuses on end-to-end artificial gravity solutions and ongoing support, not just concepts, and targets contracts that provide sustainable space habitats for science, exploration, and colonization efforts. The overall goal is to expand humanity’s reach across the solar system by creating scalable, gravity-enabled habitats that enable safe, long-term presence in space while protecting Earth's ecosystem.

Company size
501-1,000
Company stage
Debt Financing
Total funding
$500M
Headquarters
Long Beach, CA
Founded
2021

Recently Posted Jobs

Explore more opportunities at VAST

See more jobs