Senior Electric Propulsion Engineer, Kuiper - gnc

Senior Electric Propulsion Engineer

Project Kuiper is Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite broadband network. Its mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet to customers and communities around the world, and we've designed the system with the capacity, flexibility, and performance to serve a wide range of customers, from individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, and other organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.

Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

The Senior Electric Propulsion Engineer will provide technical leadership within Kuiper's Propulsion Design Engineering team as a subject matter expert for the electric propulsion system. This position demands a combination of technical depth, leadership abilities, and systems engineering experience capable of driving innovation of spacecraft propulsion technologies that ultimately enable customer service via the Kuiper satellite constellation. In this role, you will advise test, manufacturing, and mechanical engineers on electric propulsion best practices. Your expertise will directly influence all aspects of propulsion system design and development, including propellant storage and delivery, magnetic circuit design, cathode design, propulsion system architecture, avionics requirements, thermal management, embedded software design, and in-flight concepts of operation (CONOPs).

The Senior Electric Propulsion Engineer supports the system and design throughout the hardware development lifecycle, from conception, prototyping, design validation & test, through production manufacturing, and flight operations. Key responsibilities will include:

• Impact and influence the full scope of propulsion system design, development, and production including: propellant storage and delivery; thruster magnetic circuit design; cathode design; overall system architecture trades; propulsion avionics requirements; thermal management; system integration; and propulsion embedded software.
• Perform detailed system performance and risk analyses to support design trades, risk assessments, and risk mitigation plans.
• Act with delegated design authority to approve: production non-conformances; changes in design, test, and systems engineering artifacts; and Concepts of Operations for the Kuiper Propulsion system.
• Identify and assess technical risks based on data and outcomes in development, production, and flight operations.
• Lead or support test execution for development, validation, and risk assessments - especially for integrated tests across multiple large vacuum chambers suitable for testing Hall effect thrusters.
• Define test plans & test requirements to meet development and production test objectives.
• Define procedures for in-flight responses to novel off-nominal scenarios, and directly support flight operations as needed.
• Lead root-cause and corrective-action investigations supported by multidisciplinary engineering teams (e.g. design, manufacturing, test, quality).

A day in the life The Senior Electric Propulsion Engineer will work within multi-disciplinary teams as the go-to source for electric propulsion knowledge. Teams will work on all aspects of propulsion system development, implementation and production and will require you, as propulsion expert, to ensure the key aspects of device operation are being properly considered and tested within constraints. You will aid in test planning, operation and data analysis, co-author test reports and disseminate impactful results.