Such Wasted Promise at ispace U.S. - Guidance, Navigation, & Control Engineer (GNC) Ispace Employee Review

2.0
15 Aug 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They are trying to build lunar landers! They also are pretty remote-friendly, though they do prefer hybrid/in-office and only allow remote on a case-by-case basis. The rank-and-file engineers are wonderful people and I loved working beside them.

Cons

Poor leadership, especially at the Chief of Engineering level and above; they don't appear to have coherent high level goals. For example, they choose to prioritize pursuing new contracts over executing existing contracts, despite the fact that executing those existing contracts well is absolutely critical to winning new contracts. For example, filling many Product Development roles instead of prioritizing the back-filling of engineering roles where multiple highly talented individuals had recently resigned, _let alone_ hiring additional senior engineering roles. They also prefer to promote team leads from within, which would be fine if ispace US were a more well established team with years of built up experience, but instead since collectively each team doesn't have much experience, it turns into the blind leading the blind. And unfortunately it appears that most of the engineers with meaningful levels of experience are all in temporary contractor roles. They do not prioritize IT infrastructure or HR - those teams barely grew (or even shrank) during my short tenure.

Explore other reviews about Ispace

5.0
14 Oct 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

healthy environment, flexible hours, project ownership, good mentors, friendly employees

Cons

slightly disorganized, confusing documentation methods

1.0
29 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They pay you competitively and have good benefits.

Cons

Leadership has zero clue what they're doing. No one in engineering or engineering leadership has ever built and flown a spacecraft before. When they hire people who do have that experience at the technical lead level(never the manager level, because then they'd have the power to actually change things), leadership doesn't listen to any of the suggestions they have or even remotely attempt to make correct programmatic or engineering decisions. Huge "sunk cost fallacy" rules programmatics here. Technical leads are never given any sort of design authority - everything is decided upon by managers who do not have the requisite technical background to be making those decisions. They regularly do "reorgs" and change people's job titles without talking to them. This is unacceptable and cowardly. Bad decisions never fall on leadership's heads - there is never any accountability. Instead, critical engineering staff are laid off and their roles/responsibilities are distributed to whoever is left, causing further attrition. Never any accountability at the managerial or executive level for making poor decisions that have run their single program into the ground.

4
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