Radiation Engineer for Spacecraft & Payloads (LEO/MEO)

Blue Origin; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 157,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation provided

Travel up to 15%

Job summary

Blue Origin’s Seattle team seeks a TeraWave Radiation Engineer to own the end-to-end radiation hardness assurance for spacecraft, defining environments, margins, and requirements across EEE parts, payloads, and avionics. You will guide mitigation strategies, perform shielding analyses, and evaluate parts for DES/SEE/ TID effects, working with suppliers and test facilities.

This role requires U.S. citizenship or a lawful status to work in the U.S.

Qualifications

• B.S. in electrical engineering, nuclear engineering, physics, aerospace engineering, materials science, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years of experience in spacecraft radiation effects, RHA, radiation test, electronic-device physics, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated knowledge of TID and SEE mechanisms, radiation environment modeling, shielding, and electronic design mitigation.
• Experience interpreting radiation test data and determining whether data are applicable to a specific part, lot, operating condition, circuit, and mission.
• Ability to derive and communicate radiation requirements, margins, assumptions, uncertainty, and residual risk across multiple engineering disciplines.
• Ability to plan and execute technical work with external radiation test facilities and part suppliers.
• 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

• Develop, maintain, and execute the TeraWave RHA Plan for LEO and MEO spacecraft, payloads, avionics, EPS, propulsion electronics, sensors, optical devices, and solar-array technologies.
• Define and control external and internal radiation environments over the applicable mission lifetime, including trapped particles, solar particle events, galactic cosmic rays, total ionizing dose (TID), displacement damage dose (DDD/TNID), and single-event effects (SEE).
• Translate mission orbit, duration, confidence level, shielding, duty cycle, and availability needs into system, subsystem, unit, circuit, and EEE-part radiation requirements.
• Establish and maintain radiation design margin policy, including risk/criticality-based margin tiers and documented rationale for confidence, uncertainty, and lot-to-lot variability.
• Perform or direct shielding, dose-depth, sectoring/ray-trace, and part-location analyses; work with configuration and mechanical teams to maintain an analyzable spacecraft geometry.
• Evaluate EEE parts and optoelectronics for destructive and non-destructive SEE, TID, enhanced low-dose-rate sensitivity, DDD, and application-specific failure thresholds.
• Calculate mission SEE rates and translate device events into circuit, box, subsystem, and system effects such as reset rate, data loss, outage, degraded throughput, latent damage, or destructive failure.
• Partner with EEE Parts Engineering to screen BOMs, assess applicability of heritage and vendor data, disposition radiation risk, and define lot-specific testing or procurement controls.
• Partner with electrical, RF, optical, and avionics hardware designers on radiation mitigation, including part substitution, shielding, current limiting, latch-up protection, filtering, redundancy, circuit-level protection, and operating constraints.
• Support solar-array degradation predictions and end-of-life power assurance with the Solar and EPS teams, maintaining traceability among radiation confidence level, degradation factors, and the authoritative power budget.
• Maintain the radiation risk register, part-by-part evidence status, waivers/deviations, open tests, and residual risk; support design reviews and flight-readiness decisions.
• Monitor emerging radiation-effects data and provide rapid application-specific guidance for new technologies, commercial parts, FPGAs/processors, memories, power semiconductors, RFICs, and photonics.

Skills

Radiation effects

SEE mechanisms

TID modeling

Radiation testing

Systems engineering

Education

Bachelor’s degree in EE/Nuclear/Physics/Aerospace/Materials Science

Tools

Radiation test facilities

Job description

Blue Origin’s Seattle team seeks a TeraWave Radiation Engineer to own the end-to-end radiation hardness assurance for spacecraft, defining environments, margins, and requirements across EEE parts, payloads, and avionics. You will guide mitigation strategies, perform shielding analyses, and evaluate parts for DES/SEE/ TID effects, working with suppliers and test facilities.

This role requires U.S. citizenship or a lawful status to work in the U.S.