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Sr. Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

SpaceX· Starshield Satellite Engineering
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Hawthorne, CA$135k - $190kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Senior Design Criteria Engineer for SpaceX Starshield, focused on ensuring satellite mission success with high reliability across design maturation, verification, and operations, in a fast-paced aerospace development environment.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and own design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new satellite systems. Continuously improve these processes with stakeholder engagement.
  • Perform critical peer review of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns, and approve plans based on the strength of technical justification that hardware is ready for launch.
  • Guide engineers through the SpaceX design process and ensure design criteria/requirements are being followed for satellite design, manufacturing, and test activities.
  • Provide development input such as analysis or test recommendations on a wide range of engineering problems encompassing electrical, structural, and radio frequency systems.
  • Leverage involvement in broad spectrum of development efforts to be an expert resource for defining vehicle maturity status in key program reviews and communications.
  • Proactively identify development risks, then implement and track mitigation plans.
  • Develop and own long-term strategy to enable satellite and infrastructure changes, while providing daily engineering support and surge coverage for critical issues.
  • Leverage comprehensive expertise in the satellite system architecture to ensure vehicle-wide and atomic changes improve rather than degrade the satellite.
  • Review analysis and test validation approaches across a range of disciplines including electrical, mechanical, and radio frequency systems to build strong justifications for all changes.
  • Own configuration management for the satellites to ensure bill of materials accuracy for both as-designed and as-built configurations and all changes therein.
  • Provide critical input to ensure change implementation across the fleet of satellite variants is efficient and practical; ensure scope and impacts across design, manufacturing, supply chain, and test are identified and assigned; and follow-up to confirm thorough closure.
  • Serve as the primary expert for tracking and conveying history of all changes and other system-level considerations in key program reviews and investigations.
  • Develop specialized tools that enable design, analysis, and milestone tracking.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline.
  • 5+ years of experience in an engineering role (professional, project team, internship, or extracurricular experience all apply).

Skills

Required:Design criteria developmentPeer reviewSystems verification and validationConfiguration management

Benefits

  • Long-term incentives, including stock or long-term cash awards.
  • Discretionary bonuses and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
  • Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage.
  • 401(k) retirement plan.
  • Short and long-term disability insurance.
  • Life insurance.
  • Paid parental leave.
  • 3 weeks of paid vacation and 10+ paid holidays per year.
  • Paid sick leave per company policy.
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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