Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars. DESIGN CRITERIA ENGINEER (STARSHIELD) Starshield leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads. On the Starshield Design Criteria Engineering team, you will ensure that our satellites achieve mission success with high reliability. This team draws from diverse engineering backgrounds to become deeply familiar with hardware from the vehicle system to individual components. These skills will be applied across the two roles we are hiring for: As a design-focused member of this team, you will apply your technical expertise from initial conception of major design revisions and define the path through design maturation, validation, safe launch, and initial operation in orbit. This high-impact phase rewards creativity and innovation but demands foresight and mitigation of risks along the way. As a change-focused member of this team, you will lead identifying and rolling out improvements to the design and processing of satellites, while sustaining our industry-leading design iteration and manufacturing cadence. You will be rewarded by seeing these systems acting in concert to materialize innovative ideas on real satellites flying in space. In both roles, we are looking for passionate engineers with excellent technical fundamentals who thrive in fast-paced development environments to deliver rigorous improvements to the way we develop satellites. RESPONSIBILITIES: Develop and own design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new satellite systems. Continuously improve these processes with stakeholder engagement. Perform critical peer review of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns, and approve plans based on the strength of technical justification that hardware is ready for launch. Guide engineers through the SpaceX design process and ensure design criteria/requirements are being followed for satellite design, manufacturing, and test activities. Provide development input such as analysis or test recommendations on a wide range of engineering problems encompassing electrical, structural, and radio frequency systems. Leverage involvement in broad spectrum of development efforts to be an expert resource for defining vehicle maturity status in key program reviews and communications. Proactively identify development risks, then implement and track mitigation plans. Develop and own long-term strategy to enable satellite and infrastructure changes, while providing daily engineering support and surge coverage for critical issues. Leverage comprehensive expertise in the satellite system architecture to ensure vehicle-wide and atomic changes improve rather than degrade the satellite. Review analysis and test validation approaches across a range of disciplines including electrical, mechanical, and radio frequency systems to build strong justifications for all changes. Own configuration management for the satellites to ensure bill of materials accuracy for both as-designed and as-built configurations and all changes therein. Provide critical input to ensure change implementation across the fleet of satellite variants is efficient and practical; ensure scope and impacts across design, manufacturing, supply chain, and test are identified and assigned; and follow-up to confirm thorough closure. Serve as the primary expert for tracking and conveying history of all changes and other system-level considerations in key program reviews and investigations. Develop specialized tools