Staff Reliability Engineer

We are seeking a Staff Reliability Engineer to establish Hubble's component reliability function. Our payloads are built using commercial off-the-shelf components, and they must survive a multi-year LEO mission across a constellation rather than a handful of vehicles. In this role you will determine which components are acceptable for flight, define the evidence required to support that determination, and establish our approach when such evidence does not exist. That assessment spans the full set of stresses a satellite encounters, including total ionizing dose, single-event upset rate, operating temperature, thermal cycling, mechanical vibration, and cumulative time on orbit.

You will define and execute the qualification program supporting those determinations, including test strategy for total ionizing dose and single-event effects, test vehicle design, coordination with proton and heavy-ion facilities, accelerated life testing, thermal and mechanical stress qualification, and the safe operating area and derating policy applied to each part. You will also establish the failure feedback loops connecting manufacturing, test, and design, and set priorities across this work as the program scales from individual vehicles to production rate.

The role is cross-functional by design. You will work closely with hardware design engineering on component selection, derating, and design review; with the test and validation team on qualification test design and execution; with embedded engineering on fault detection, mitigation, and recovery in firmware; with supply chain on sourcing, lot control, and obsolescence management; and with satellite operations on telemetry review and anomaly investigation. Your conclusions are expected to apply across every board in the payload rather than to any single subsystem.

This is an ON-SITE / HYBRID, FULL-TIME POSITION based in Seattle, with sporadic travel to support test campaigns.

AN IDEAL CANDIDATE MEETS OUR VALUES: 

A Sense of Urgency:  Lead projects from concept to reality, rapidly and effectively

First Principles Engineering:  Have a strong understanding of the whys behind the whats; have the ability to extrapolate from first principles to complex system design

High Learning Agility:  Love to learn; have a grounded approach to recognizing your weaknesses and take the initiative to brush up on and sharpen your engineering foundations to better collaborate with your teammates with different backgrounds 

System-Level Design and Analysis:  Understand the requirements flow down process and be able to quickly iterate on evolving requirements
Excellent Communication Skills:  Effectively convey ideas and communicate technical topics with engineering, build staff, and operations; run self-directed design reviews and participate in reviews of parallel systems
Anticipation of Needs:   Identify problems, think creatively, and rapidly produce reliable and cost-effective solutions to meet the ever growing and changing needs of an early-stage company

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Materials Science, Nuclear Engineering, or a related technical field
• 8+ years of engineering experience, with significant depth in component reliability for spaceflight or other high-reliability electronics
• Demonstrated hands-on ownership in at least one of the following areas, with working knowledge of the other:
• Radiation effects: direct experience designing test vehicles, coordinating beam time, executing total ionizing dose and single-event campaigns, and reducing the resulting data, including destructive mechanisms such as single-event latch-up and single-event burnout
• Physics-of-failure component reliability: direct experience designing and executing accelerated life, thermal cycling, or environmental stress testing, and deriving usable life or derating conclusions from the results
• Working knowledge of reliability analysis methods, including FMEA or FMECA, derating analysis, worst-case circuit analysis, and life estimation from accelerated test data using established acceleration models
• Experience developing qualification and acceptance test plans against recognized standards such as JEDEC JESD22 and JESD47, MIL-STD-883, ECSS-Q-ST-60, or NASA EEE-INST-002
• A physics-of-failure approach to reliability, including the ability to identify the mechanism underlying a failure rather than only its statistical characterization, and an understanding of the conditions under which standard acceleration models cease to be valid
• Experience qualifying commercial, industrial, or automotive-grade components for space or other harsh environments, including the development of defensible criteria in the absence of vendor data or upscreening budget
• Failure analysis and root-cause investigation on flight or flight-representative hardware, including the sequencing of destructive analysis when only a single failed unit is available
• Proficiency in Python for test automation, data reduction, and analysis

STRONGLY DESIRED

• Heavy-ion qualification of a complete spacecraft and working knowledge of LEO radiation environment models, including dose-depth and shielding analysis
• Authorship of a company radiation qualification standard or equivalent internal specification and established working relationships with proton and heavy-ion test facilities
• Single-event upset mitigation for commercial FPGAs and SoCs, including memory scrubbing, triple modular redundancy, and software-level handling
• Highly accelerated life and stress screening (HALT and HASS), including test-to-failure characterization and derivation of production screening limits
• Lot acceptance testing, burn-in, and destructive physical analysis of commercial components, including construction analysis and die-level inspection
• Derating policy development and verification, and the translation of qualification results into design guidance the engineering team can apply directly
• Definition of health, diagnostic, and housekeeping telemetry sufficient to observe component degradation in flight
• Fleet-level trending and statistical analysis of on-orbit performance, including detection of parametric drift, infant mortality, and wearout onset
• On-orbit anomaly categorization and root-cause investigation, including correlation of failures to environmental conditions and operating history
• Correlation of observed on-orbit failure rates against ground qualification predictions, and revision of qualification criteria based on that comparison
• Experience at constellation scale, where preventing the propagation of a design defect across large production volumes takes precedence over the qualification of any single build
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small technical team

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
    💰 Salary: $128,000-$224,000 (commensurate with experience)
      🩺 Comprehensive Benefits – Health, Dental, Vision, & HSA options
      🌍 Unlimited PTO
      🚇 Commuter Benefits (if working from HQ)
      🎓 Learning & Development Allowance
      💪 Health & Wellness Stipend
      🌎 Sabbatical Program – Recharge and explore new ideas
      🛠 Cutting-Edge Space Tech – Work on state-of-the-art satellite system

ITAR REQUIREMENTS

Hubble is required by the U.S. Government to comply with various space technology export regulations including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).  All applicants must be U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents (“green card holders”) as defined by ITAR (22 CFR §120.15). More information on ITAR can be found here.

Hubble is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. Each individual has the right to work in a professional environment that promotes equal employment opportunity and prohibits discriminatory practices, including harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.