R&D with growing pains - Supply Chain Sierra Space Employee Review

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.

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.

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

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.