Greenwood Village, Colorado, US (On-site)1 open job
U.S. space and defense prime building modular spacecraft and end-to-end mission solutions for national security, government, and commercial customers, including Link-16 tactical communications from orbit.
York Space Systems builds and flies spacecraft for customers who cannot afford ambiguity: the Department of Defense, national security and missile defense programs, government and civil space agencies, and commercial constellation operators. Founded in 2012 and based in the United States, the company positions itself as a space and defense prime covering the whole stack - spacecraft manufacturing and production, payload integration, system integration and testing, launch services, ground segment services, and mission operations. It claims the number one spot among providers to the DoD's Proliferated Warfighting Space Architecture (PWSA) by spacecraft operating in orbit, and it says it was the first and only company to demonstrate Link-16 connectivity from space.
That is the stakes ledger, and it is the reason security work here is not a bolt-on function. The company operates a modular satellite architecture built for rapid production and mission flexibility, and it delivers constellations on a production cadence it says outpaces traditional aerospace manufacturers. The attack surface is genuinely unusual: tactical data links carried from orbit, ground segment services that gate command and control, mission operations that run continuously, and a supply chain feeding spacecraft at scale. Threat models range across the space, ground, and enterprise segments - including the terrestrial IT and production environments where spacecraft are actually built.
Technical domains at the company span spacecraft manufacturing and production, payload and system integration, launch and ground segment services, mission operations, modular satellite architecture, and satellite constellations, with a stated focus on space-based tactical communications (Link-16) and missile defense / national security space systems. Verticals served include national security, defense, government, commercial space, civil space, and missile defense. The company was founded by CEO Dirk Wallinger to address evolving national security threats from space, and its stated differentiation is price, speed, and capability - delivered against a requirement for mission-critical reliability.
Roles touching this infrastructure sit at the intersection of flight systems and the networks that command them. Expect to work alongside production, integration and test, ground, and mission operations teams rather than in an isolated security silo.
