Senior Motor Controls Lead for Spaceflight Systems

Blue Origin; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 183,000 - 256,000; 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 a family of embedded motor controllers used across lunar vehicles and mechanisms. This hands-on role includes bringing up hardware in the lab, defining architectures, and guiding a team through requirements, verification, and qualification for high-reliability systems.

Candidates should have strong leadership, deep motor control and embedded electronics experience,

Qualifications

• Experience developing motor control or motor drive systems for electromechanical actuators.
• Experience with embedded control electronics in high-reliability environments.
• Experience owning a technical baseline including requirements and verification planning.
• Ability to lead a technical team and communicate clearly.
• Hands-on lab experience with hardware bring-up and testing.

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.
• Coordinate with systems, firmware, electrical, mechanical, safety, reliability, manufacturing, and test teams to ensure successful product delivery.
• Communicate technical status, risks, issues, and trade decisions clearly to peers, management, and program stakeholders.
• Support technical reviews and ensure actions, risks, and open issues are tracked to resolution.

Skills

Motor control systems

Embedded electronics

Technical leadership

Lab bring-up and debugging

System interfaces and verification

Education

Bachelor\'s in Electrical Engineering

Bachelor\'s in Aerospace Engineering

Bachelor\'s in Computer Engineering

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Logic analyzers

DAQ systems

HIL bench testing

Schematic/PCB review

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 a family of embedded motor controllers used across lunar vehicles and mechanisms. This hands-on role includes bringing up hardware in the lab, defining architectures, and guiding a team through requirements, verification, and qualification for high-reliability systems.

Candidates should have strong leadership, deep motor control and embedded electronics experience,