Senior Motor Control Engineer on Core Avionics will serve as the Responsible Engineer for a family of embedded motor controllers reused across multiple vehicles and mechanisms. They will own the technical baseline—requirements, architecture, interfaces, design decisions, configuration control, verification evidence, and qualification approach—and guide a multidisciplinary team to deliver safe, repeatable, high-reliability motor control products supporting human lunar missions. The engineer will interface directly with internal vehicle customers, NASA, and National Team Partners to define product needs and ensure the controllers meet performance, fault tolerance, and safety objectives.
Responsibilities
- Own the motor controller family technical baseline as the Responsible Engineer: requirements, architecture, design decisions, interfaces (ICDs), configuration control, and lifecycle documentation to enable reuse across vehicles.
- Partner with vehicle and subsystem teams ("customers") to define product needs: performance, environments, fault tolerance, safety/hazard controls, operability, integration constraints, and reuse strategy.
- Develop controller architectures spanning power electronics, sensing, embedded processing, and firmware to support motor technologies including BLDC and stepper.
- Guide a multidisciplinary team (EE power, EE digital, firmware, mechanical, analysis, test, systems, safety/reliability, manufacturing) through concept → design → build → integration → test → qualification.
- Define and manage controller interfaces to motors, resolvers/encoders/sensors, vehicle power, and avionics networks; ensure robust EMI/EMC and grounding/bonding strategies as applicable.
- Drive fault‑tolerant motor control design: redundancy strategies, safe‑state behavior, fault detection/isolation/recovery, built‑in test, degraded modes, and telemetry for health management.
- Plan and execute verification: define test strategy and procedures; support bench bring‑up, HIL where appropriate, environmental testing, and qualification/acceptance evidence closure.
- Coordinate parts selection and design practices considering space radiation effects (TID/SEE), derating, and mitigation approaches appropriate to mission.
- Communicate progress, risks, and trade decisions clearly; lead technical reviews and ensure issues are tracked to closure.
Minimum Qualifications
- Demonstrated experience developing and delivering motor drive/control systems for stepper and/or BLDC motor applications (architecture through test).
- Experience with high‑precision and/or high‑speed motor control in safety‑critical or high‑reliability systems.
- Experience designing fault‑tolerant control electronics and embedded control behavior (FDIR, safe state, redundancy management).
- Experience owning a technical baseline for a product line (requirements, ICDs, design trades, verification/validation, configuration control), including reuse across multiple platforms.
- Demonstrated technical leadership guiding multidisciplinary teams to successful product delivery.
- Familiarity with space radiation effects and mitigation strategies relevant to electronics.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including leading technical reviews.
- B.S./B.A. in engineering or a relevant technical field.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience developing spacecraft mechanism controllers (e.g., solar array drive assemblies, antenna gimbals, valve controllers, pump drives).
- Experience with Altium (or equivalent) for PCB design collaboration/review.
- Experience performing FMEA/FTA (including network/system‑level fault tree contributions) or other reliability/fault tolerance analyses.
- Experience with systems engineering tools such as Jama (or similar).
- Experience working in a safety‑critical development environment and supporting qualification testing campaigns.
- Basic project management skills (planning, milestones, risk management, cross‑team coordination).
Compensation Range
- CA applicants: $ – $
- CO applicants: $ – $
- WA applicants: $ – $
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, paid parental leave, short and long‑term disability, 401(k) with a company match of up to 5%,…