Principal Electrical Engineer, AI Satellites (Starmind)

Principal Electrical Hardware Engineer, AI Satellites

SpaceX is leveraging its experience deploying and operating the world's largest satellite constellation to develop Starmind, a new constellation of satellites capturing solar energy in space to power low-cost, high-performance AI compute for Earth.

Realizing this vision demands highly reliable, high performance electrical hardware ranging from power electronics, high speed digital systems, mixed signal designs, robust avionics, networking, and custom compute electronics. These systems must operate in the extreme environment of space while delivering the connectivity, control, power distribution, and processing needed for orbital AI inference.

The Starmind team designs, builds, and operates the orbital compute fabric of the future. We develop nearly every key piece of technology in house - from the satellites' flight computers and power systems to the fully custom compute electronics, memory, and networking that form the brain of our on-orbit data centers.

As an engineer on the Starmind Payload Engineering team, you'll have ownership over the entire life-cycle of the hardware that enables advanced on-orbit AI processing and data center workloads. Your work sits at the intersection of electrical, mechanical, thermal, and software engineering.

The Payload team is responsible for the design of industry-leading compute electronics, memory, and networking in order to achieve required domain sizes and processing workloads.

Responsibilities

• Rapidly develop high-reliability electronics for satellites and spacecraft.
• Drive system trades, requirements capture, component selection, analysis, schematic capture, PCB layout, prototyping, hardware bring-up, debugging, documentation, manufacturing, test, and on-orbit performance of complex electrical designs
• Get hands-on and support hardware through production, satellite integration, and flight
• Determine layer stackup, perform component package selection, component placement, routing feasibility studies, and signal routing of digital, analog, RF, and power conversion of PCBs
• Library creation and maintenance
• Create and release documentation for fabrication of PCBs
• Collaborate with internal teams and PCB vendors to continually improve design rules, constraints and design for test and manufacture guidelines
• Work closely with engineers from adjacent disciplines (mechanical, thermal, software, test engineering, supply chain, silicon design, etc.) to deliver tightly integrated, high-performance hardware
• Challenge assumptions, question requirements, learn from your mistakes, and approach problems with an open mind

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or physics
• 10+ years of industry experience designing circuits, electronic products, or hardware

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Master's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or similar engineering degree
• 2+ years of professional experience rapidly designing and delivering highly reliable products
• 2+ 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
• 2+ 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
• 2+ years of professional experience testing, troubleshooting, and debugging electronics
• Strong understanding of computers and programming languages (Python, C/C++)
• Demonstrated ability to work in a highly cross-functional role
• 2+ years working on aerospace systems

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work extended hours or weekends as needed for mission critical deadlines
• Some travel may occasionally be required

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.