Senior Vehicle Design Engineer – Spacecraft Structures

Rocket Lab Corporation; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Rocket Lab in Auckland is seeking a Senior Designer within the Vehicle Design team to influence the primary and secondary structures, mechanisms, and fluids systems for Electron and related payloads. You will drive design changes to improve performance, reduce risk, and lower manufacturing costs, while developing mission-specific configurations for customer payloads.

The role offers leadership over design projects, mentorship of engineers, and the chance to contribute to end-to-end hardware

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with honours in Aerospace, Mechanical or Mechatronics Engineering.
• 5+ years of engineering experience.
• Significant experience modelling in 3D CAD, ideally NX CAD, and Teamcenter.
• Creative, analytical approach and strong problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work on your own initiative and plan your own workflow to deliver higher-level goals.
• Clear communication skills, with the ability to steer technical discussions and decisions.
• The ability to stay calm under pressure.
• The flexibility to adapt as business priorities change.
• A positive, 'How can I help?' attitude and a drive to keep raising the standard of excellence.

Responsibilities

• Make design changes to the Electron vehicle and associated hardware to improve performance, reduce risk or reduce manufacturing cost.
• Design primary and secondary structures, mechanisms, and fluids components and systems.
• Define design requirements, and design prototype parts and tooling as required.
• Develop mission-specific configurations for customer payloads.
• Address quality issues that arise on the production floor through design and process improvements.
• Contribute to design documentation, including FMEAs, P&IDs and ICDs.
• Lead design projects without supervision, building strong stakeholder buy-in and collaboration across the company.
• Set the design direction for significant development projects and coordinate them.
• Maintain design data for the components and systems you're responsible for.
• Improve design processes and help develop our key design tools, particularly NX CAD and Teamcenter, to cut non-value-added effort from the design and engineering process.
• Mentor less experienced members of the team and role model high standards of design methodology and documentation.
• Get hands-on with general design, construction and assembly tasks. No task is beneath us.

Skills

Engineering experience

Problem solving

Communication skills

Initiative & planning

Education

Bachelor's degree with honours in Aerospace, Mechanical or Mechatronics Engineering

Tools

NX CAD

Teamcenter

Job description

Rocket Lab in Auckland is seeking a Senior Designer within the Vehicle Design team to influence the primary and secondary structures, mechanisms, and fluids systems for Electron and related payloads. You will drive design changes to improve performance, reduce risk, and lower manufacturing costs, while developing mission-specific configurations for customer payloads.

The role offers leadership over design projects, mentorship of engineers, and the chance to contribute to end-to-end hardware