ELECTRICAL ENGINEER (STARSHIELD PAYLOADS)

Job Description

About the Company:

SpaceX was founded on the belief that a future where humanity explores the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we do not. The company is actively developing technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars. Starshield, a SpaceX program, leverages Starlink technology and launch capabilities to support national security efforts. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield focuses on government use, initially concentrating on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads.

Job Description: Electrical Engineer (Starshield Payloads)

This role involves ultimate ownership of ensuring the successful operation of bus and payloads on orbit via the avionics suite. As an electrical development engineer on the Starshield team, you will be responsible for a wide range of tasks throughout the entire hardware lifecycle. This includes:

• Design: Electrical architecture and design, product requirements, component selection, analysis, schematic capture, and documentation.
• Production: Flight production, development prototyping, vendor selection, and manufacturing.
• Testing & Debugging: Circuit and full product bring-up, debugging, troubleshooting, and confidence, acceptance, and qualification testing. This also includes integration and full vehicle integrated testing, as well as on-orbit operations support and data review.
• Project Management: Delivering flight hardware on time and active project management through schedule maintenance and status reports.
• Collaboration: Multidisciplinary coordination with software, firmware, mechanical, PCB layout, environments, integration, harnessing, test, manufacturing, and production teams.
• System Engineering: Ensuring the design meets all intents and does not adversely impact other groups or designs. This requires thinking at a system level to ensure design viability.
• Improvement: Driving improvements in reliability and capabilities while minimizing cost and schedule.

The position demands working in a fast-paced environment, solving previously unsolved problems, and pushing the limits of what’s possible through innovation, determination, and teamwork. The program is rapidly growing, offering diverse opportunities from blank-sheet design to on-orbit troubleshooting.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 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 & Experience:

• Master’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or 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 life cycle development)
• 2+ years of experience designing and implementing mixed-signal circuit boards (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)