Principal Spacecraft Avionics Hardware Development Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: On-site in El Segundo, California, United States. Employees must be authorized to work in the United States and qualify as a U.S. person under ITAR requirements.

Salary: $181,913–$262,763 per year, plus eligibility for stock options and/or long-term cash awards.

Company

Develops commercial space infrastructure, including in-orbit pharmaceutical processing payloads, reentry capsules, heat shields, and satellite buses, with vehicles and hardware built, integrated, and tested in-house.

What you will do

• Architect and design flight-critical electrical hardware for satellite buses, reentry vehicles, and customer payloads, including flight computers, power systems, and sensors.
• Own PCB electronics design across schematic capture, layout, design validation, fabrication, assembly, and manufacturing test.
• Translate mission and company objectives into subsystem requirements, designs, and development milestones.
• Contribute to avionics architecture, vehicle-level integration, and system-level integration test plans with flight software, thermal, GNC, structures, pharmaceutical, mission operations, and integration teams.
• Own product acceptance and qualification testing for thermal, vibration, shock, TVAC, and EMI environments.
• Perform root-cause analysis on test failures, implement flight-risk mitigations, define safe operating criteria, and mentor junior engineers.

Requirements

• B.S. in Electrical or Computer Engineering or a related engineering discipline.
• 8+ years of direct electronics hardware design experience, including schematic capture, PCB layout, board bring-up, and environmental qualification, in aerospace, automotive, or another high-reliability industry.
• 3+ years of direct experience working on space hardware.
• Experience owning the architecture and implementation of complex electronics systems from design through production or deployment.
• Advanced PCB design expertise, including high-speed signal integrity, power and grounding, and electromagnetic compatibility.
• Experience taking complex PCB designs through fabrication and assembly, and expert use of Altium and/or KiCad EDA suites.
• Strong hands-on laboratory experience with oscilloscopes, function generators, benchtop digital multimeters, and power supplies.
• Experience programming in Python, MATLAB, or another scripting or data-analysis language.
• Experience implementing hardware layers for onboard and over-harness communication protocols, including SPI, RS422, and 1000BASE-T.
• Experience designing analog and digital filtering, mixed-signal circuits, power electronics, load switches, and switch-mode DC:DC converters; understanding of aerospace sensors and actuators including RTDs, pressure transducers, brushless motors, solenoid valves, thermocouples, stepper motors, and rotary or linear encoders.

Nice to have

• Industry-leading electronic circuit design and analysis skills.
• Strong general knowledge of physics, mathematics, and chemistry fundamentals for designing electronics exposed to unique environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Work is performed on-site at the El Segundo facility, where vehicles, equipment, and materials are built, integrated, and tested.
• Access to long-term incentives through stock options and/or long-term cash awards.
• Inclusive workplace with evaluations based on merit, qualifications, and performance.
• Employees work with hardware exposed to demanding flight and space environments and investigate failures thoroughly.