Design Reliability Engineer (Crew Starship)
Hawthorne · Starbase, TX · 1+ years experience · Posted Sep 24, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 1+ years experience
- Location
- Hawthorne · Starbase, TX
About the role
- The HLS Design Reliability team ensures flight hardware and concepts-of-operations meet internal and external design requirements for the Human Landing System.
- This role involves evaluating and guiding engineering designs from concept to flight while facilitating cross-disciplinary problem-solving.
Responsibilities
- Develop design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new systems.
- Ensure adherence to SpaceX design processes and criteria for flight, launch, and recovery systems.
- Provide critical peer review and approval of hardware designs during design reviews.
- Provide critical peer review and approval of acceptance and qualification test campaigns.
- Drive improvements to vehicle design through close integration with hardware teams.
- Perform verification reviews of hardware and systems.
- Ensure customer design criteria and requirements are addressed for flight systems.
- Lead spacecraft certification efforts through direct interaction with U.S. Government customers.
- Tailor and negotiate requirements and verifications to meet program goals.
- Review vehicle changes to ensure qualification compliance.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline.
- 1+ years professional experience in fabrication, assembly, and/or testing.
- Must be available to work long hours and weekends as necessary.
- Must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. lawful permanent resident, refugee, or asylee to conform to U.S. Government export regulations.
Preferred qualifications
- Master's degree in an engineering discipline.
- Experience with aircraft, launch vehicles, spacecraft, or other aerospace systems.
- Experience with aircraft, launch vehicle, or spacecraft requirements and standards.
- Experience with standards and requirement negotiation.
- Excellent customer interface skills.
- Experience with at least one commercial FEA package (NASTRAN, ABAQUS, or ANSYS).
- Hands on experience with various industry standard manufacturing tools, techniques and processes.
- Scripting and data analysis experience using Visual Basic, Matlab, Python and Excel.
Benefits
- Long-term incentives (company stock or long-term cash awards)
- Discretionary bonuses
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Medical, vision, and dental coverage
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Short and long-term disability insurance
- Life insurance
- Paid parental leave
- 3 weeks of paid vacation
- 10 or more paid holidays per year
Skills
- NASTRAN
- ABAQUS
- ANSYS
- Visual Basic
- Matlab
- Python
- Excel
