Senior Motor Control Avionics Engineer – Lunar Permanence

About the role

This role is part of the Lunar Permanence business unit, which develops Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers and related products. The goal is to build sustainable infrastructure for transporting crew and cargo from Earth to the lunar surface.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the Responsible Engineer for a family of embedded motor controllers, owning the technical baseline across requirements, architecture, interfaces, verification, and lifecycle documentation.
• Define and maintain reusable motor controller product architectures for application across multiple mechanisms, vehicles, and mission use cases.
• Partner with vehicle and subsystem teams to understand mission and mechanism needs, including performance, environmental, fault tolerance, operability, safety, and integration requirements.
• Develop controller solutions spanning embedded processing, sensing, power electronics, interfaces, and firmware for motor technologies including BLDC and stepper motors.
• Work directly with controller hardware in the lab, supporting bench bring-up, checkout, integration, troubleshooting, and failure investigation.
• Debug issues that span hardware and software boundaries using standard lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, power supplies, DAQ systems, and HIL/bench test setups.
• Define and manage interfaces between motor controllers and motors, resolvers/encoders/sensors, vehicle power, avionics networks, and higher-level system control functions.
• Guide a multi-disciplinary engineering team across concept development, design, build, integration, test, qualification, and production transition.
• Lead design trades and technical decision-making for controller performance, redundancy, fault handling, environmental robustness, manufacturability, and reuse.
• Drive fault-tolerant control strategies including safe-state behavior, fault detection/isolation/recovery, built-in test, degraded modes, and health telemetry.
• Plan and execute verification efforts, including test strategy, procedure development, hardware bring-up, integration support, environmental test support, and closure of qualification and acceptance evidence.
• Review hardware designs, schematics, layouts, component selections, and test results in close collaboration with electrical design engineers.
• Cookordination with systems, firmware, electrical, mechanical, safety, reliability, manufacturing, and test teams to ensure successful product delivery.
• Support technical reviews and ensure actions, risks, and open issues are tracked to resolution.

Requirements

• B.S. in electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, or another relevant technical field.
• Significant experience developing and delivering motor control or motor drive systems for stepper, BLDC, or similar electromechanical actuator applications.
• Experience with embedded control electronics in safety-critical, high-reliability, or mission-critical environments.
• Hands-on experience working with control hardware in the lab, including bring-up, integration, test, troubleshooting, and verification of embedded electromechanical systems.
• Ability to debug issues spanning electronics, firmware, sensors, actuators, communications interfaces, and system integration.
• Experience designing or evaluating fault-tolerant architectures and fault response behavior for embedded control systems.
• Strong written, verbal, and presentation communication skills.

Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, computer engineering, robotics, controls, or a related field.
• Experience with spacecraft or aerospace mechanism controllers such as gimbals, valve actuators, pump drives, solar array drive assemblies, or deployable systems.
• Experience with hardware bring-up and debug of motor controller electronics, including mixed-signal, digital, and power interfaces.
• Experience reviewing or contributing to electronics hardware design, including schematic review, PCB layout review, parts selection, design-for-test, or design-for-manufacture.
• Prior ownership of motor controller, actuator controller, or embedded avionics hardware through qualification and production.
• Familiarity with radiation effects, derating, component selection, and mitigation approaches relevant to space electronics.
• Experience with FMEA, FTA, reliability analysis, hazard analysis, or safety-critical development practices.
• Experience with qualification, acceptance, and environmental test campaigns.
• Familiarity with systems engineering and requirements management tools such as Jama or similar platforms.
• Experience working in a highly integrated development environment with firmware, electrical, systems, and test teams.