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.
• Career Development: Mentor junior engineers and contribute to the growth of the team.

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.
• 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.

Skills

• Deep experience with motor control systems and embedded electronics.
• Strong technical leadership skills.
• The ability to guide a multi-disciplinary team through the full product lifecycle.
• Comfortable debugging real hardware and resolving issues across electronics, firmware, sensors, actuators, and system interfaces.

Benefits

Benefits include: 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%, and an Education Support Program. Stock Options for all regular employees (working at least 20 hours/week). Paid Time Off: Up to four (4) weeks per year based on weekly scheduled hours, and up to 14 company-paid holidays. Depending on role type and job level, employees may be eligible for benefits and bonuses based on the company's intent to reward individual contributions and enable them to share in the company's results, or other factors at the company's sole discretion. Bonus amounts and eligibility are not guaranteed and subject to change and cancellation. Please check with your recruiter for more details.

Pay

For CA applicants is $183,193.00 - $256,469.85 CO applicants is $173,466.00 - $242,851.35 WA applicants is $183,193.00 - $256,469.85 Other Site Ranges May Differ

Schedule

Full-time