Electrical Engineer, Spacecraft Payloads (Starshield)
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Job Description
About SpaceX:
SpaceX was founded on the belief that a future where humanity explores the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Their ultimate goal is to enable human life on Mars, actively developing the technologies to make this a reality.
Job Description: Electrical Engineer, Spacecraft Payloads (Starshield)
Starshield, a SpaceX program, leverages Starlink technology and launch capabilities to support national security efforts. Unlike the consumer-focused Starlink, Starshield is designed for government use, initially concentrating on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads.
As an electrical development engineer on the Starshield team, you will have ultimate ownership of ensuring the successful operation of bus and payloads in orbit. This involves a wide range of responsibilities throughout the entire hardware lifecycle, including:
• Design: Electrical architecture and design, product requirements definition, component selection, analysis, schematic capture, and documentation.
• Development & Production: Flight production, development prototyping, vendor selection, and manufacturing.
• Testing & Verification: Circuit and full product bring-up, debugging, troubleshooting, and conducting confidence, acceptance, and qualification testing. Delivering flight hardware on time, actively managing project schedules and reporting status.
• Integration & Operations: Integration, full vehicle integrated testing, on-orbit operations support, and data review.
• Collaboration: Multidisciplinary coordination with software, firmware, mechanical, PCB layout, environmental, integration, harnessing, test, manufacturing, and production teams.
• System Engineering: Ensuring designs meet all requirements and don’t negatively impact other systems.
• Continuous Improvement: Driving improvements in reliability and capabilities while minimizing cost and schedule.
The role demands a fast-paced, problem-solving approach, requiring you to explore solutions for previously unsolved problems. It’s a highly cross-functional role requiring system-level thinking and strong communication skills. Experience with blank-sheet design and on-orbit troubleshooting is highly valued.
Basic Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or physics.
• 1+ years of professional experience designing and delivering electrical hardware (internship and project experience are applicable).
Preferred Skills and Experience:
• Master’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or a similar engineering degree.
• 4+ years of professional experience rapidly designing and delivering highly reliable products.
• 2+ years of electronic product experience designing electrical hardware from concept through production (emphasis on full lifecycle development).
• 2+ years of experience designing and implementing mixed-signal circuit boards using processors, FPGAs, Ethernet, multi-GHz SerDes, DRAM interfaces (DDR4), I2C, SPI, operational amplifiers, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and power supply components.
• 2+ years of professional experience with hands-on testing, troubleshooting, and debugging electronics.
• 2+ years of professional experience with fast-paced projects.
• Strong understanding of computers and programming languages (Python, C/C++).
• Demonstrated ability to work in a highly cross-functional role.
• Ability to work autonomously in a demanding environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Passion for advancing the commercial space industry and human spaceflight.
• Active Top Secret or Top Secret SCI clearance (desired, but not required).
ITAR Requirements: Applicants must be a U.S. citizen, national, lawful permanent resident, refugee, or asylee, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
