Vantaggi
You get to work on some truly exciting space missions alongside extremely bright coworkers. You are a crucial employee no matter the role. You will have meaningful technical contributions and ownership over your work. Your technical skills will improve significantly in breadth and depth - you can learn in 2 years here what you might learn in 5 years at other companies. Your technical achievements and skills will be apparent when you inevitably interview for other companies. Lots of good publicity and employee swag (shirts, hats, etc.)
Svantaggi
Top 3 issues with company: Turnover, money, schedule. The pros are amazing, but good luck surviving here for more than 2 years. More below: Root cause of all issues in my opinion boils down to business development bidding laughably low on contracts, resulting in lack of resources to meet contract deadlines unless employees work unpaid overtime. Management is incompetent and does not support your team. Many program managers chase schedule at the expense of you, the engineer. Long-term planning and technical improvements will be sacrificed for short term payment milestones, program after program. Even if you have a program manager trying their best to support you, they themselves are firefighting for the entire contract duration. Company is stingy with money and raises - single percent raises year after year. Teams are understaffed - not a single team i’ve encountered across operations, AIT, flight software, systems, mechanical, etc. has enough people to support the number of programs occurring. Extremely high turnover, especially of critical engineers. Those who developed the first Rocket Lab satellites’ architecture, test infrastructure, software, etc. are no longer with the company. New engineers are hired in at lower salaries and cannot replace domain knowledge. Average tenure is ~2 years across all experience levels. Long work hours - Collaboration with New Zealand means US engineers frequently are in meetings until 6pm or later. I’ve had workdays from 9am-11pm. Overtime work is not compensated and implicitly expected. Work from home is not allowed. Excessively lean teams prevent long-term and cross-program technical planning. Every product feels delivered with band-aid solutions.