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Lead Mechanical Engineer, Hardware Reliability (Starlink)

SpaceX· Starlink Reliability - Bastrop
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Bastrop, TXFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Lead a team focused on reliability of Starlink hardware from design to field, driving strategies, investigations, and improvements to minimize hardware failures and customer downtime for Starlink product hardware.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor a team of engineers and specialists focused on hardware reliability and field performance for the Starlink User Terminal Kit, including user terminals, Wi-Fi routers, power supplies, and cables.
  • Allocate resources across new product qualification campaigns, production reliability priorities, and field hardware investigations to ensure appropriate technical coverage, timely execution, and rapid troubleshooting of failures
  • Develop individual team members through technical mentorship, clear ownership, and opportunities aligned with individual growth and the strategic goals of the Starlink program
  • Partner closely with hardware design, software, manufacturing, and supply chain teams to proactively influence current and future designs and maximize reliability across the product lifecycle
  • Manage or lead technical investigations with tight timelines concerning isolated or fleet-wide performance or hardware issues that affect Starlink customers
  • Develop and execute reliability qualification strategies for new and existing products to maximize field life, minimize early-life failures, and demonstrate readiness for mass production
  • Design and execute environmental, mechanical, electrical, RF, and system-level reliability testing tailored to product architecture, use conditions, and identified failure mechanisms to qualify changes in high volume manufacturing
  • Automate reliability test execution, data analysis, and reporting using appropriate data visualization and engineering tools to improve speed, repeatability, and technical decision-making
  • Define and monitor ongoing reliability testing and monitoring strategies to assess manufacturing process health and identify long-term reliability risks driven by process, material, and component variability
  • Define and monitor critical hardware and performance field metrics, such as product return rates, to identify and investigate product reliability shortcomings
  • Oversee production quality activities including containments, material review board (MRB), defect processing, quality metrics, training, and applicable command media for factory compliance
  • Identify manufacturing inefficiencies that impact product reliability and drive process improvements that increase first-pass yield, improve quality, reduce scrap, and accelerate issue detection and resolution
  • Maintain applicable quality system and ISO 9001 requirements
  • Lead root cause investigations for qualification, production, and field failures; identify immediate and underlying failure mechanisms and drive corrective actions to reduce product and process risk
  • Perform telemetry and log analysis as well as hands-on debugging to drive to root cause and corrective action of failed phased-array, Wi-Fi, and power supply PCBAs in the field
  • Understand Wi-Fi standards and how the Starlink network operates

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, manufacturing engineering, aerospace engineering, or another engineering discipline
  • 2+ years of experience executing complex engineering projects in design qualification, manufacturing, hardware reliability, reliability test, or a production environment
  • 1+ years of experience in a leadership position leading a team of 3+ engineers

Skills

Required:LeadershipReliability engineeringEnvironmental, mechanical, electrical, RF, and system-level testingData analysis and automationCommunication
Nice to have:Quality systems (ISO 9001, AS9100 familiar)PCB/PCBA and hardware systems
Last updated Jul 15, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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