El Segundo, California, US (On-site)2 open jobs
Varda Space Industries builds autonomous spacecraft that manufacture pharmaceuticals and advanced materials in microgravity and return them to Earth via reentry capsules.
Varda Space Industries builds autonomous spacecraft that double as factories. Founded in January 2021 by an ex-SpaceX engineer and a venture capitalist, the company designs, flies, and operates the W-Series: vehicles that serve as microgravity manufacturing facilities and reentry capsules, producing products on orbit - drug formulations and advanced materials that are hard to make under Earth's gravity - and returning them to the ground. Missions have already been flown successfully; the company does not publish a count.
For security professionals, the interesting part is the shape of the system. The W-Series is autonomous, which means the attack surface is a distributed one: flight software and command uplinks, ground segment and telemetry downlinks, mission operations infrastructure, and the return-and-recovery path for physical payloads. On top of that sits proprietary pharmaceutical formulation and process data, plus a supply chain that spans aerospace hardware and biotech processing. The company is interdisciplinary by design, pairing aerospace and biotech expertise on one team, and it is hiring as that team grows.
Context worth knowing: the stated mission is that space shouldn't just be a destination for exploration but a production line for Earth, with a longer view toward a functioning orbital economy. That puts manufacturing IP, regulatory handling of pharmaceutical and space hardware data, and the integrity of uncrewed spacecraft operations squarely in the threat model - not as a hypothetical, but as the day-to-day substrate of the business.
