Senior Motor Controls Lead Engineer Lunar Vehicle Systems

Blue Origin; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Origin in Seattle is seeking a Senior Motor Controls Lead Engineer on the Core Avionics team to own the technical baseline for embedded motor controllers used across lunar vehicles and mechanisms.

This hands-on role combines requirements ownership, architecture decisions, and direct lab work, with responsibilities spanning hardware bring‑up, verification, fault-tolerant control, and collaboration with electrical design engineers.

Qualifications

• Deep experience with motor control systems and embedded electronics.
• Strong technical leadership and team guidance across product lifecycle.
• Hands-on hardware bring-up, debugging, and lab verification.
• Experience with fault-tolerant control strategies and health telemetry.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the lead controls engineer for a family of embedded motor controllers, owning the technical baseline across requirements, architecture, interfaces, verification, and lifecycle documentation.
• Define and maintain reusable motor control architectures for application across multiple mechanisms, vehicles, and mission use cases.
• Partner with vehicle and subsystem teams to understand mission and mechanism needs, including performance, environmental, fault tolerance, operability, safety, and integration requirements.
• Develop control solutions for lunar valves, latches, pumps, fans, and blowers.
• Work directly with controller hardware in the lab, supporting bench bring‑up, checkout, integration, troubleshooting, and failure investigation.
• Debug issues that span hardware and software boundaries using standard lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, power supplies, DAQ systems, and HIL/bench test setups.
• Define and manage interfaces between motor controllers and motors, resolvers/encoders/sensors, vehicle power, avionics networks, and higher‑level system control functions.
• Drive fault‑tolerant control strategies including safe‑state behavior, fault detection/isolation/recovery, built‑in test, degraded modes, and health telemetry.
• Plan and execute verification efforts, including test strategy, procedure development, hardware bring‑up, integration support, environmental test support, and closure of qualification and acceptance evidence.
• Review hardware designs, schematics, layouts, component selections, and test results in close collaboration with electrical design engineers.

Skills

Motor control systems

Embedded electronics

Technical leadership

Hardware debugging

Lab testing

System interfaces

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Mechanical/Mechatronics engineering

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Logic analyzers

Power supplies

HIL/bench test setups

Job description

Blue Origin in Seattle is seeking a Senior Motor Controls Lead Engineer on the Core Avionics team to own the technical baseline for embedded motor controllers used across lunar vehicles and mechanisms.

This hands-on role combines requirements ownership, architecture decisions, and direct lab work, with responsibilities spanning hardware bring‑up, verification, fault-tolerant control, and collaboration with electrical design engineers.