Awful Leadership, Awful Delivery, Awful Culture… A few good people are left. - IT Team Sierra Space Employee Review

1.0
May 17, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- There are a few good team members left. - Pay check did not bounced. - Benefits were pretty good, but going down hill - Free soda in the break room

Cons

- Senior Leadership is amazingly awful. Been without a CEO for over a year, just got a new one. COO is not trustworthy and not truthful. He is in so far over his head there is almost no chance for success. He is AMISS for sure. The CIO is clueless. The CFO saw the righting a the wall and jumped ship. Engineering leadership is always turning over. - Constant Re-Orgs and lay offs. - They talk about all the cool products they made, but nothing ever finishes. DreamChaser is years late, has not launched. Space Station Life Habitats is all but shelved, never launched. Satellites are the new hot talking point, not 1 in orbit. - Financial mismanagement. Blew all series B funding, just got series C (proves there is a sucker born every minute) that will gone before you know it. I expect they will be out of business, or split up and sold, or absorbed back into SNC within a year. - Been talking about an IPO and going public for years, still have not.

Explore other reviews about Sierra Space

5.0
Jul 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Joined a few months ago, right as Dan Jablonsky (ex-Maxar, ex-Ursa Major) took over as CEO and the company closed a $550M Series C at an $8B valuation. That combination of new operational leadership plus fresh capital is rare to walk into, and you can feel the shift toward more disciplined execution already. The mission itself is the real draw: Dream Chaser, the LIFE habitat, Orbital Reef, national security space work. The company is pushing hard on modern AI tooling across engineering, from code assistance to workflow automation, so you’re not fighting decade-old tooling to get things done. And unlike the primes, the company is still small enough that an individual engineer can move a program forward, not just a ticket queue. If you want your work to be traceable to a launch, this is one of the few places left where that’s true.

Cons

This is a company mid-transition: post-spinoff, post-CEO-change, scaling fast, so process and communication are still catching up to ambition. Expect some rough edges: unclear ownership on cross-team work, evolving standards, and the pace that comes with a fast-growing R&D shop. If you need a fully mature org chart and buttoned-up process on day one, wait a year or two.

2.0
Jul 21, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pay has been great and my coworkers are mostly pretty talented.

Cons

Leadership is *completely* lacking. My tech lead is a good guy but he should not be in charge of a team. On my team, only three engineers (out of about ten) have the ability to push the "Merge" button on our merge reviews for code. Yes, that is right, you literally cannot merge in your own code even after you've gone through the review process. Engineers frequently hold up code reviews because file comments included incorrect copyright dates or because member variables were not documented. I have actually found that I'd rather do less work so that I can put up fewer code reviews. It's common for something simple to take 1-4 weeks to get merged in.

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