Fall 2026 Engineering Internship/Co-op

General Astronautics builds the robotic labor force for space. Our autonomous dexterous robotic arms operate without astronaut intervention in microgravity, enabling pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and fiber optic production that outperforms what is achievable on Earth. Microgravity is a proven manufacturing frontier and decades of research have established its advantages. We are building the platform that finally makes it commercially accessible at scale.

General Astronautics was founded on the belief that the bottleneck to humanity's expansion into space is labor, not rockets or science. We build autonomous dexterous robots to close the gap on the science that humanity can't afford not to do. We are building the robots that will make orbital manufacturing routine. This is the unlock to new pharmaceutics, new materials, and new planets.

We are hiring exceptional students for engineering roles in Fall 2026. As an intern, you will work directly with your mentor and the founding team on projects that ship to orbit. You will write code, build hardware, and run experiments that show up on the critical path to our upcoming demo mission.

If you have shown academic strength and a track record of building things outside the classroom, you are a strong candidate.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Design and Development

• Own a mechanism or subassembly from requirements through hardware. You will run the trade studies and support your work with first principles engineering methods.
• Build and iterate detailed CAD models and mechanical drawing’s, and make real calls on materials, tolerances, and assembly sequence for flight-ready hardware.
• Utilize classical and FEA analysis to ensure safe margin and reliability across all load conditions.

Testing and Validation

• Write and execute the test plans for your own hardware. Build the fixtures, wire the instrumentation, take the data, and figure out what it means.
• Support qualification and acceptance campaigns, including parabolic flight and on-orbit demo hardware.
• Produce the full design package: drawings, analysis reports, BOMs, and assembly documentation good enough for someone else to build from.

Optimization and Integration

• Run cost and manufacturability trades across parallel configurations, and learn to weigh design risk against a schedule that does not move.
• Work across the whole stack with a small team. Your mechanism has to integrate with the robot, the payload, and the vehicle, and you will be in the room for all of it.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Enrolled in a bachelor's degree program in engineering, physics, computer science, or math by the start of employment
• GPA of 3.5 or above
• 6+ months of hands-on technical work outside the classroom (research, project teams, personal builds, prior internships)
• Strong written and verbal communication, comfortable working alongside engineers, technicians, and the founding team
• Thrives in a dynamic startup environment where priorities shift fast
• Proficient in prototyping, order-of-magnitude estimations, and hand calculations

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Experience designing tooling and testing structures
• Mechanisms and electromechanical hardware experience
• Proficient in CAD (Siemens NX, SOLIDWORKS) and simulation (MATLAB, Ansys)

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

• Minimum 12 weeks on-site in San Francisco
• Willingness to work extended hours and weekends as necessary to support critical project milestones
• U.S. citizen or national, U.S. lawful permanent resident, or eligible for authorization under U.S. export regulations

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

Pay range: Engineering Intern, Sophomore: $30.00/hour. Engineering Intern, Junior or Senior: $35.00/hour.

General Astronautics is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Our autonomous robotic arms are designed for small form factor deployment and operate without human intervention in microgravity. The core technical challenge is applying the cutting edge of robot learning and reasoning to a data-denied environment where microgravity manipulation datasets are scarce, physics behave differently, and teleoperation latency rules out human fallback. Our stack spans low-level real-time arm control, multi-camera perception and localization, and learned manipulation policies trained on both open-source datasets and proprietary microgravity-specific data. We combine decades of accumulated space biology and materials research with modern robotics and machine learning to build a system that generalizes across novel lab tasks in orbit. The result is a platform that makes the known commercial value of orbital drug, semiconductor, and fiber optic production finally accessible at scale.