Staff Materials & Process Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Long Beach, California, United States; on-site at least three days per week, with remote flexibility when the work allows.

Hiring range: $150,000–$226,000 USD annually.

Company

hirify.global builds rockets, including the Terran R launch vehicle, and develops aerospace manufacturing and agentic design tools through its Awerx team.

What you will do

• Encode metallurgy and manufacturing-process expertise into design rules, process windows, material models, and manufacturability checks for Awerx design-for-manufacturing systems.
• Develop guidance for directed energy deposition, including WAAM and other DED processes, CNC machining, and combined deposition-to-machining workflows.
• Build materials and process datasets covering microstructure, residual stress, defects, properties, provenance, and uncertainty for nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium.
• Plan and execute hands-on validation programs involving coupons, test articles, heat treatment, NDE, metallography, and mechanical testing.
• Lead qualification of hybrid-manufactured hardware, including qualification plans, process controls, and statistically based design allowables aligned with NAVSEA requirements and MMPDS methodology.
• Collaborate with software, design, production, materials, quality, and supplier teams to convert shop-floor knowledge and failure modes into explicit tool constraints.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Metallurgy, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of materials and process engineering experience on aerospace or other high-reliability metal hardware.
• Expertise in physical metallurgy of nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium, including solidification, phase transformations, heat treatment, and defect formation.
• Hands-on experience developing or qualifying directed energy deposition processes such as WAAM, laser DED, or electron-beam DED, and integrating them with CNC machining.
• Experience designing and running coupon, metallography, NDE, and mechanical-testing programs.
• Experience generating statistically based A- and B-basis design allowables to NAVSEA, MMPDS, or comparable requirements.
• Proficiency in Python or a similar language for data analysis and scripting.

Nice to have

• PhD in Materials Science, Metallurgy, or a related field.
• Experience with sintered-powder routes, laser powder bed fusion, or multi-material and bimetallic interfaces such as copper-to-superalloy transitions.
• Experience with ICME, CALPHAD, thermo-mechanical process simulation for additive manufacturing, CAM, or deposition path planning.
• Experience qualifying additive parts for flight under NASA-STD-6030 or comparable standards, or applying machine learning to materials or process data.

Culture & Benefits

• Work combines software and hardware development in aerospace manufacturing, with autonomy, ownership, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Hybrid arrangement with at least three on-site days per week because much of the work is hands-on.
• Competitive salary and equity, generous PTO and sick leave, parental leave, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• hirify.global is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodation upon request.