Design Reliability Engineer (Crew Starship)

About the role

After 50 years, humankind will once again return to surface of the moon using SpaceX's new vehicle, the Human Landing System (HLS) - this time for good. Leveraging the lessons learned from our flight proven Dragon spacecraft, Falcon and now Starship, HLS will usher in the next era of manned spaceflight and exploration, ultimately allowing us to establish permanent communities on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

The HLS Design Reliability team is responsible for ensuring that flight hardware and concepts-of-operations lead to successful completion of missions while meeting or exceeding both internal and external design requirements. We perform a unique engineering role, evaluating and guiding engineering designs from concept to flight. We facilitate cross-disciplinary action and problem-solving across all SpaceX programs and staff.

Responsibilities

• Develop design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new systems.
• Ensure that the SpaceX design process & design criteria/requirements are being followed for flight, launch, and/or recovery systems, including:
• Provide critical peer review and approval of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns.
• Drive improvements to vehicle design through close integration with hardware teams.
• Perform verification reviews hardware and systems.
• Ensure that the customer design criteria/requirements are addressed for flight systems, including:
• Lead spacecraft certification efforts through direct interaction with U.S. Government customers.
• Tailor and negotiating requirements and verifications to meet program goals.
• Review vehicle changes to ensure qualification compliance.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline.
• 1+ years professional experience in fabrication, assembly, and/or testing.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Master's degree in an engineering discipline.
• Experience with aircraft, launch vehicles, spacecraft, or other aerospace systems.
• Experience with aircraft, launch vehicle, or spacecraft requirements and standards.
• Experience with standards and requirement negotiation.
• Excellent customer interface skills.
• Experience with at least one commercial FEA package (NASTRAN, ABAQUS, or ANSYS).
• Hands on experience with various industry standard manufacturing tools, techniques and processes, including mills, lathes, electronics assembly, composite layup, etc.
• Scripting and data analysis experience using Visual Basic, Matlab, Python and Excel.

Additional Requirements

• Must be available to work long hours and weekends as necessary.

Itar Requirements

• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.