Lead Mechanical Engineer (Starship Avionics)

Starship Avionics Mechanical is responsible for producing an avionics system minimizing vehicle cost/mass and providing electrical sensing, actuation, and control for flying the vehicle. Avionics includes RF communication, navigation sensors, electrical actuators, video systems, propulsion sensors, and energy storage. This role leads a team of mechanical engineers, and it is within a larger avionics team of electrical engineers designing electrical system and vehicle operations.

This role will partner closely with adjacent Starship engineering and production teams to continuously improve the design and manufacturability of avionics hardware for current and next-generation vehicles. Team mission is to develop highly producible mechanical designs and packaging solutions that protect electronics from the harsh mechanical and thermal environments of launch vehicle operations.

- Extreme ownership of avionics engineers to enable the rapid progress of design, integration, test, and launch activities

- Drive conceptual design, architecture trades, and first order sizing

- Optimize the development speed, mass, and cost on our avionics

- Perform in depth first principles analysis and FEA to assess and optimize designs

- Incorporate design for manufacturing principles, drive first article builds, and make improvements necessary to hand off subsequent builds to production

- Support production issues and drive design, process, and procedure improvements for maximum production efficiency and rate after first article build

- Design and execute development, acceptance, and qualification testing

- Drive delivery timeline through conception, design, parts, assembly and integration, and launch

- Work closely with analysts to develop thermal, vibration, and loading requirements and with manufacturing engineers to optimize designs for rapid manufacturability

- Bachelor's degree in an engineering, science, or math discipline

- 3+ years of professional experience designing mechanical components or assemblies

- 1+ years of experience leading teams, either formally or as part of a team project

- Creative problem solving that can bring multiple disciplines together with the ability to assess risk and make design and development decisions without all available data

- Ability to work in a fast paced, autonomously driven, and demanding atmosphere

- Self-motivated with strong multi-tasking, organizational, communication and documentation skills

- Proficient and frequent use of hand calculations, finite element analyses (FEA), and computer-aided designs (CAD)

- This position is based in Starbase, TX and requires being onsite - remote work not considered

- Must be able to work extended hours and weekends to support critical project and mission milestones