Turbomachinery Mechanical Design Engineer
About the role
Turbomachinery Mechanical Design Engineer at Orbital Operations to develop high-performance pumps, turbines, and rotating assemblies for their Cryogenic Propulsion Management System (CPMS); involved across full hardware lifecycle from architecture trades to manufacturing, assembly, and testing in a fast-paced startup environment.
Responsibilities
- Own turbomachinery hardware from initial requirements and architecture trades through detailed design, manufacturing, assembly, test, and flight qualification.
- Develop detailed component designs, drawings, interface definitions, tolerance analyses, and geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) for rotating and stationary hardware.
- Perform or coordinate structural, thermal, rotordynamic, fluid, and life analyses to validate designs across operating and transient conditions.
- Work closely with propulsion, fluids, manufacturing, test, and avionics teams to define interfaces and ensure successful integration into the complete engine system.
- Define component and assembly-level test objectives, instrumentation requirements, acceptance criteria, and data-review processes.
- Support component and assembly testing and data review on an as-needed basis
Qualifications
- Minimum of a B.S. degree in mechanical or aerospace engineering.
- 2+ years’ experience in turbomachinery design and development with 5+ years’ experience in an engineering discipline.
- 2+ years’ experience working with CAD software, preferably Siemens NX
- Comfortable working in fast-paced, startup environment.
- Demonstrated experience taking complex mechanical hardware through design, fabrication, assembly, and test.
- Strong understanding of mechanical design fundamentals, including fits and tolerances, bolted joints, fatigue, fracture, thermal growth, and high-speed rotating machinery.
- Experience creating production-quality engineering drawings using GD&T in accordance with ASME Y14.5.
- Working knowledge of metallic materials, coatings, heat treatments, and manufacturing processes used in turbomachinery.
Skills
About Orbital Operations
High Thrust Space Vehicles for Satellite Defense
Orbital Operations is developing a high thrust, reusable space vehicle for satellite defense. We protect critical satellites, like GPS and Military communication satellites, from adversarial threats, like China and Russia. Our vehicle will use the exact same propulsion systems that launch vehicles have used for decades by implementing a cryogenic management system. This will give us over 100x the thrust or current in-space propulsion. Ross and I have over 15 years of combined aerospace experience across NASA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space. We’ve worked side by side for more than 3.5 years developing propulsion systems, turbomachinery, and building our own respective engineering teams. We are currently working on the first demo of our unique cryo management system and intend to launch an operational vehicle by 2027.
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