Senior Mission Design and Navigation Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Long Beach, California, United States

Salary: $148,000–$222,000 USD annually

Company

hirify.global develops rockets, including the Terran R vehicle, to deliver customer payloads to orbit and expand access to space exploration.

What you will do

• Own mission design and trajectory analysis for the 2028 Mars Orbiter mission.
• Develop and optimize interplanetary and Mars orbital trajectories under spacecraft, communications, operations, and science constraints.
• Expand into technical ownership of flight navigation, including orbit determination, trajectory estimation, maneuver analysis, and navigation data processing.
• Define requirements, interfaces, and processing methods for Deep Space Network radiometric measurements, including Doppler, range, and Delta-DOR.
• Develop mission design and navigation tools, software requirements, architectures, and analysis capabilities.
• Coordinate mission design and navigation across GNC, spacecraft systems, communications, software, and mission operations.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, astronautical or aeronautical engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics, or a related technical discipline, plus 5+ years of related experience.
• Experience with spacecraft mission design, astrodynamics, flight navigation, orbit determination, or mission design and navigation software development.
• Strong understanding of orbital mechanics, trajectory analysis, and spacecraft mission design and navigation methods.
• Experience with radiometric navigation and orbit determination.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions, requirements, and tradeoffs across engineering disciplines.
• Software development experience in Python, MATLAB, or a similar language, including collaboration on requirements and architectures for mission-critical systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with MONTE mission design and navigation software.
• Experience supporting interplanetary or deep-space missions or working with the Deep Space Network.
• Experience analyzing DSN tracking measurements, including Doppler, range, and Delta-DOR.
• Experience with flight navigation operations, maneuver design and analysis, or orbit determination.
• Familiarity with DSN systems, interfaces, navigation data products, and configuration management in mission-critical environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on the Terran R launch vehicle and the Interplanetary Sciences Program’s Mars Orbiter mission.
• Collaborative work across propulsion, manufacturing, software, avionics, spacecraft systems, GNC, communications, and mission operations.
• Competitive salary and equity.
• Generous paid time off and sick leave, parental leave, and an annual learning and development stipend.