Avoid - Engineer Sierra Space Employee Review

1.0
Oct 23, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

401k matching great, health benefits industry standard. The bonuses are great despite missing all actual goals last year (I.e. DreamChaser to the cape), especially for senior leaders.

Cons

Toxic leadership, very top heavy with too many directors, VPs, SVPs for the number of products they are putting out. No clear organization because of this. All the bureaucracy of a legacy company without the aerospace expertise leads to painfully slow progress. You are constantly creating PowerPoints to justify the simplest approval, by the time it goes through the undefined approval process you have to start over because constant reorganization has changed who is ‘responsible’. Essentially progress grinds to a halt. Company brags about the almost $300million Series B funding round ‘success’ but Tom Vice actually failed to secure the funding needed to continue long term. He attempted to get Saudi backers but they saw the reality, DreamChaser is being built in a warehouse pretending to be a clean room, led by a mostly aviation background leadership that have no real understanding of the launch industry. Extensive layoffs are coming down the pipeline in order to keep DreamChaser going.

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.

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All