Flight Reliability Engineer: Falcon & Dragon

SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP; Hawthorne (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Medical, vision, dental

401(k) retirement plan

Disability & life insurance

Paid parental leave

Vacation & holidays

Job summary

SpaceX in Hawthorne, CA is seeking a Design Reliability Engineer to guide engineering designs for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon vehicles. You will evaluate concepts to flight-readiness and collaborate across hardware teams to ensure mission success.

The role emphasizes development of design criteria, verification methods, and production-ready processes, with opportunities to contribute to safety-critical aerospace systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering required.
• 1+ years in a hardware engineering role.
• Master's degree preferred.
• Experience with aircraft/launch vehicles/spacecraft or aerospace systems.
• Experience with at least one commercial FEA package (NASTRAN, ABAQUS, ANSYS).
• Hardware ownership on award-winning project or competition team.
• Experience with electromechanical design, analysis, & fabrication.
• Hands-on with manufacturing tools and processes.
• Experience with material selection and make vs buy decisions.
• Scripting/data analysis using Visual Basic, Matlab, Python and Excel.

Responsibilities

• Ensure that the design process and criteria are followed for flight, launch, and recovery systems.
• Provide peer review and approval of hardware designs during design reviews and tests.
• Develop design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new systems.
• Set up processes to enable reliable operations of launch vehicles and spacecraft.
• Drive design improvements by working closely with hardware teams.
• Review vehicle changes to ensure qualification of all hardware and operations.
• Develop specialized design and analysis tools for other engineering groups.

Skills

Hardware engineering

Electromechanical design

Fabrication and testing

Scripting and data analysis

Visual Basic

Python

MATLAB

Excel

Education

Bachelor's degree in engineering

Master's degree in engineering

Tools

NASTRAN

ABAQUS

ANSYS

Manufacturing tools (mills, lathes, electronics assembly, composite layup)

Job description

SpaceX in Hawthorne, CA is seeking a Design Reliability Engineer to guide engineering designs for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon vehicles. You will evaluate concepts to flight-readiness and collaborate across hardware teams to ensure mission success.

The role emphasizes development of design criteria, verification methods, and production-ready processes, with opportunities to contribute to safety-critical aerospace systems.