- Job title
- Founding Lunar Avionics / Electronics Engineer
- Job location
- Hawthorne, CA, US
- Job description
- Your circuit board will wake up on the lunar surface next year.
You’ll design the electronics and flight software that bring our 2027 lunar payload to life: commanding the ISRU brick fabrication process, inflating a habitat bladder, and getting data back to Earth.
**What you’ll do:**
* Design the avionics stack: controller boards, power distribution, sensor interfaces and valve actuation electronics.
* Write the flight software for payload sequencing, closed-loop process control, and fault management.
* Own the electrical interface to the CLPS lander (power, data, commanding, telemetry formatting).
* Select and qualify components for the lunar radiation and thermal environment.
* Design and build harnessing, including a lunar umbilical cord exposed on the Moon for our deployable payload.
**What we’re looking for:**
* Experience designing mixed-signal PCBs from schematic through layout, fabrication, and bring-up (full-cycle).
* RS-485 / serial protocol design: you can write a protocol ICD and define baud rate, framing, CRC, and fault handling from scratch.
* Flight software in C/C++ on microcontrollers: state machines, FDIR, watchdog logic, closed-loop control.
* Familiarity with spaceflight-adjacent standards for wiring, grounding, and EMI/EMC.
* Power electronics: 28 Vdc conditioning, inrush limiting, motor driver integration, and power budget analysis.
* Harness design: MIL-STD-38999 connectors, EMI/EMC compliance, thermal-rated wire and insulation (Kapton/PTFE), shielding continuity.
* Comfort operating across the hardware/software boundary: you can debug a board with an oscilloscope and a JTAG probe.
* You’ve built flight hardware before
* Excellent communication skills
**Must haves:**
* Experience architecting an avionics system from scratch that flew into space: you've taken a design from concept to launch and can point to it.
* Full-cycle PCB design: schematic through layout, fab, bring-up, and in-system debug.
**Nice to haves:**
* Experience writing ICDs and technical documentation delivered to a vehicle or launch provider.
* Familiarity with actuator drive electronics (brushed DC motors, NEA/pyro devices) or compressed-gas systems.
* Comfortable interfacing with mechanical design teams.
* Onboard data storage design: NAND flash, wear leveling, downlink queue management.
* Experience with radiation-tolerant or rad-hard component selection.
* You can drink from the fire hose.
**ITAR Requirements**
To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.