Founding Lunar Avionics / Electronics Engineer

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.