Lead Hardware Development Engineer (Starlink)

About the role

Starlink believes in providing fast, reliable internet to serve populations with little or no connectivity. We design, build, launch, and operate the world's largest constellation of satellites, enabling us to operate a global internet network unbounded by traditional ground infrastructure limitations.

The root of SpaceX's success so far lies in our mission to keep all engineering and production in-house, which enables a tight feedback loop, nimble decision-making, and speedy deliverables. With millions of daily users worldwide already online, Starlink is truly a game changer and levels the playing field for those who were previously unconnected.

We are developing cutting-edge, highly reliable, and high-volume electronics for communicating with our constellation of satellites and are looking for outstanding engineers to join our team.

The Starlink Product Development Team is responsible for the development of customer-facing products which are manufactured in the range of many millions per year, including phased array satellite dishes, high speed WiFi routers, and power supplies.

As a Lead Hardware Engineer on the Starlink team, you will lead a team of 3-5 engineers, and own the full ecosystem and roadmap of our consumer electronics from start to finish. You will set the technical direction, grow the engineers on your team into product owners, and work regularly with partner teams across antenna, software, mechanical, thermal, manufacturing, and production test to take this hardware from initial concept through full-scale production.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 3-5 engineers to rapidly design, develop, and test highly reliable electronics for our Gateway systems
• Drive electrical architecture, specification, component selection, circuit board design, implementation, verification, board bring-up, and debugging
• Optimize existing designs to improve reliability and reduce production and field defects
• Implement automated design validation test assets to speed up development cycles
• Hire, coach, and develop direct reports so they can own their products and make decisions without waiting on you
• Develop and train direct reports to enable product ownership and empowered decision making
• Partner with antenna, software, mechanical, networking, thermal, manufacturing and production test teams

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering or physics
• 3+ years of professional experience with hardware design/development or electronics test engineering

Preferred Skills and Experience

• 6+ years of professional experience rapidly designing and delivering highly-reliable products
• 6+ years of electronic product experience designing hardware from concept through production; strong emphasis on full life cycle development of new hardware products and not small incremental updates to legacy hardware
• 6+ years of experience designing and implementing mixed-signal circuit boards from concept through production using 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
• 6+ years of professional experience testing, troubleshooting, and debugging electronics
• Strong understanding of computer networking and interfaces (10/100/400/800G networking/Tbps switches)
• Strong understanding of optical networking architectures and fundamentals
• Strong understanding of computers and programming languages (Python, C/C++)
• Experience in desktop/server Linux and embedded operating systems
• Demonstrated ability to work in a highly cross-functional role
• Excellent communication skills both written and verbal

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work extended hours or weekends as needed for mission critical deadlines
• Ability to travel to other sites (Hawthorne, CA and Redmond, WA) up to 20%

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.