Lead Space Autonomy Architect — On-Orbit Ops

Blue Origin; Florida; On-site; USD 173,000 - 256,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

401(k) with company match

Education Support

Stock Options

Paid time off

Job summary

Blue Origin in the United States seeks a Principal Space Vehicle Autonomy Architect to lead on-orbit autonomy strategies for national security, civil government, and commercial programs. You will guide trade studies, write CONOPs, define requirements, and coordinate across GNC, Flight Software, and Sensor/Payload teams to enable autonomous spacecraft operations.

You will mentor teams, manage lifecycle autonomy from initialization to deorbit, and ensure rigorous testing and verification processes

Qualifications

• B.S. in Aerospace, Software, Electrical, Mechanical, Physics, Systems Engineering, or related technical subject area.
• 10+ years of technical experience developing space mission design and autonomous systems.
• 10+ years of technical experience in the space autonomy domain, including on-orbit autonomous operations, relative navigation, orbital mechanics, and multi-spacecraft coordination.
• Strong background developing space autonomy CONOPs, requirements, and interface description documents to flow to element-level teams.
• Demonstrated experience with fleet-level autonomy and/or rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) throughout the mission design lifecycle, from conceptualization through operational flight.
• Applied experience in autonomy and mission design tools such as MATLAB/Simulink, STK, FreeFlyer, GMAT, or equivalent.
• Experience developing high-level plans for end-to-end integrated system tests occurring throughout a program's lifecycle.
• Outstanding customer relationship skills, including the ability to discover requirements underlying feature requests, recommend alternative technical and business approaches, and lead engineering efforts to meet ambitious timelines with optimal solutions.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with customers, stakeholders, systems engineering, architecture, hardware, and software teams to ensure cross-functional autonomy deliverables are identified and tracked.
• Author proposal documents targeting national security customers, civil government agencies, and commercial entities pursuing advanced on-orbit autonomous operations.
• Coordinate with Guidance, Navigation & Control (GNC), Astrodynamics and Trajectory Execution (ATX), Flight Software, Telecommunications, and Sensor/Payload teams to perform detailed trade studies for autonomous maneuver planning, RPO sequencing, and fleet-level coordination.
• Establish goals and metrics to identify opportunities to deliver autonomous system solutions to cost, performance, and schedule requirements.
• Assess fleet-level autonomy and RPO performance against current and future mission scenarios to align with company and customer needs, including coordinated observation, spectrum / beam management, network / mesh routing, and graceful degradation.
• Inform autonomy performance, risk, and operations for scheduled missions, including ConOps development, ground systems feasibility, and human-machine teaming frameworks.
• Lead the development of on-orbit autonomy architectures - including autonomous rendezvous, proximity operations, and multi-spacecraft coordination - encompassing requirements definition, trade studies, and roadmap planning.
• Lead the definition & development of full lifecycle autonomy including initialization, service orbit attainment, predictive health & degradation monitoring, over-the-air software updates, and end-of-life / deorbit.
• Create high-level verification and testing processes and procedures that ensure compliance to requirements.
• Mentor and train across the program to ensure autonomy approach, philosophy, and technology are understood and implemented to provide required capabilities and value to customers
• Support autonomous operations during live mission activities, including real-time monitoring of autonomous maneuver execution, anomaly response, and fleet state management

Skills

Autonomy architecture

Leadership

Customer collaboration

Written communication

System design

Education

B.S. in Aerospace or related field

Ph.D. in related field (preferred)

Tools

MATLAB/Simulink

STK

FreeFlyer

GMAT

Job description

Blue Origin in the United States seeks a Principal Space Vehicle Autonomy Architect to lead on-orbit autonomy strategies for national security, civil government, and commercial programs. You will guide trade studies, write CONOPs, define requirements, and coordinate across GNC, Flight Software, and Sensor/Payload teams to enable autonomous spacecraft operations.

You will mentor teams, manage lifecycle autonomy from initialization to deorbit, and ensure rigorous testing and verification processes