Head, Structures

About the role

Canada Rocket Company is building a sovereign launch capability for Canada. We're looking for a Head of Structures to build and lead the team responsible for the structural backbone of our launch vehicle This is a foundational leadership role: you'll own the strategy, design authority, and delivery of the major load and pressure bearing systems that determine the vehicle’s mass efficiency, manufacturability, robustness, and ultimately its path to orbit.

You’llbuild the structures organization around program needs in close partnership with vehicle leadership, system architects, and adjacent engineering leads, ensuring the team has the right capabilities across design, analysis, materials, manufacturing, and test.

If you want to shape the structural backbone of an entire launch vehicle program from the ground up, this is the role.

What you'll do

• Define and execute the structural engineering strategy for Canada Rocket Company's orbital launch vehicle, spanning architecture, design, analysis, material selection, manufacturing approach, test, and qualification

• Own the development of the vehicle’s major structural elements, including propellant tanks, thrust structures,interstages, fairings, and other load-bearing assemblies, from early concept through flight hardware.

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing structure, thermal and mechanical engineering team,establishinghiring plans, engineering processes, and a culture ofrigourand ownership.

• Drive structural design and sizing across static, dynamic, thermal, acoustic, vibration, buckling, fatigue, fracture, and coupled load environments, ensuring performance across the full mission lifecycle.

• Partner closely with propulsion, fluids, mechanisms, manufacturing, integration, and test teams to ensure structural solutions are well integrated at the vehicle level

• Collaborate with the Mission, Systems, and GNC teams to properestablishand classify requirements, loads, and envelopes ensuring missionobjectivescan be met

• Lead material and processselectionfor structural systems, including metallic and composite approaches whereappropriate, with clear rationale tied to performance, manufacturability, cost, quality, and rate capability.

• Establish the structural analysis, verification, and test approach, includingmarginspolicy, calculation discipline, FEM/FEA strategy, test correlation, development test campaigns, and qualification logic.

• Establish andmaintainstructural design and analysis standards appropriate for flight and ground safety

• Drive design-for-manufacture and design-for-assembly decisions, working closely with production and supply chain to ensure practical, repeatable, and scalable fabrication methods.

• Collaborate with vehicle leadership and system architects to make sound trade-offs between mass, robustness, manufacturability,logistics, schedule, and cost.

• Contribute hands-on to structural/mechanical/thermal design, technical reviews, analysis direction, and critical problem-solving.

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years of experience in structural design, analysis, and development for high-performance aerospace or similarly demanding hardware, with a meaningfulportionin a technical leadership capacity.

• Deep experience with primary structures for vehicles,aircraft, spacecraft, launch systems, or other weight-critical systemsoperatingunder complex load environments.

• Strong understanding of structural mechanics, including strength of materials, stability, buckling, fatigue, fracture, dynamics, joints, and load paths, with sound engineering judgment grounded in first principles.

• Experience leading structuraldevelopment from conceptthrough detailed design, manufacturing, test, and validation.

• Direct experience in design and manufacture of both small and large assemblies including weldments and bolted interfaces

• Experience making material and manufacturing process decisions for structural hardware, with an understanding of how those choices affect mass, cost, schedule, quality, and production scalability

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, particularly in environments requiring close integration between design, analysis, manufacturing, test, and systems engineering.

Preferred

• Direct experience with launchvehicle, propulsion structure, pressurevessel, cryogenictank, interstage, fairing, or other aerospace structural systems.

• Hands-on experience with metallic primary structures, weldments, machined structures, formed structures, friction stir welding, bonded assemblies, and the fixturingrequired

• Experience with finite element analysis and structural test correlation, including development and interpretation of detailed and system-level models.

• Familiarity with qualification and acceptance strategies for aerospace structures, including proof, burst, modal, vibration, acoustic, and combined-load testing.

• Experienceoperatingin a rapid hardware development environment where iterative design-build-test cycles are central to the engineering culture.

• Exposure tospace and aerospace loads and structural analysis standards.

• Hold an advanced degree in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, or a related field.

About Canada Rocket Company

Canada Rocket Company is developing Canada's first medium-lift launch vehicle.

We are a team of veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab,ArianeGroup, Pangea Propulsion, Tesla, MDA, and more, bringing over a century of combined launch and space systems experience back to Canada.

Our mission is to provide reliable, independent access to space for Canada and its allies in a rapidly expanding global market.

Our approach is defined by pragmatic engineering: