Electrical Systems Engineering Manager Principal - SV Engineering - Avionics & Payloads

York Spaces Systems•Greenwood Village, CO

10d•Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior or Principal Electrical Systems Engineer to lead the development of next-generation spacecraft power architectures. This role will support major changes to our vehicle electrical power system, including increased bus voltages above 100 VDC, higher-power payloads, new power distribution architectures, and more demanding mission environments. The engineer will be responsible for turning broad mission needs into practical, testable, flight-ready electrical systems. This is not a component-selection or requirements-tracking position. The successful candidate will be expected to understand how high-power switching DC systems behave, identify where the architecture will fail, and lead the technical work required to make it reliable. The work will involve incomplete information, difficult trades, aggressive schedules, and decisions with consequences that may not become visible until integration, test, or flight. Candidates should be comfortable operating in that environment and taking direct ownership of results. This role will be fully on-site in our Greenwood Village office.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or a closely related technical field.
Significant professional experience designing, integrating, or analyzing switching DC power systems.
Demonstrated experience with high-voltage DC power conversion or distribution systems.
Strong understanding of DC-DC converters, switching regulators, power semiconductors, control loops, filters, magnetics, protection circuits, and power distribution.
Experience developing electrical architectures from system-level mission needs.
Experience evaluating transient behavior, fault response, stability, efficiency, and power quality.
Experience taking hardware through design, integration, test, and failure resolution.
Ability to review and challenge electrical designs at the schematic, subsystem, and vehicle architecture levels.
Ability to independently solve poorly defined technical problems.
Ability to communicate complex electrical behavior to engineers from other disciplines.
Willingness to work directly with hardware and support critical integration and test activities when required.
Willingness to work full-time in our Greenwood Village, CO office; this position does not support remote or hybrid work.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in electrical engineering, power electronics, or a related field.
Experience with spacecraft electrical power systems.
Experience with power architectures operating above 100 VDC.
Experience with solar arrays, battery systems, battery management systems, peak-power tracking, or regulated and unregulated spacecraft buses.
Experience with silicon carbide power devices.
Experience with solid-state power controllers, electronic circuit breakers, or high-voltage load switching.
Experience designing for vacuum, radiation, charging, plasma, and extreme thermal environments.
Experience with electric propulsion power interfaces.
Experience with high-power payloads, directed energy, communications payloads, radar, or other pulsed and dynamic loads.
Knowledge of spacecraft grounding, bonding, electromagnetic compatibility, and electrostatic discharge.
Experience with failure modes and effects analysis, fault-tree analysis, worst-case circuit analysis, derating, and reliability analysis.
Experience developing qualification and acceptance test programs.
Experience investigating complex electrical failures that cross hardware, software, controls, and operations boundaries.
Familiarity with SPICE, MATLAB, Simulink, Python, or comparable electrical modeling and analysis tools.
Experience leading technical teams or serving as a design authority.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, integration, and verification of spacecraft electrical power systems.
Develop power system architectures supporting bus voltages of 100 VDC and above.
Apply switching DC power system expertise to spacecraft power generation, storage, conversion, distribution, protection, and load management.
Define system-level requirements for power quality, stability, grounding, fault protection, isolation, efficiency, transient response, and electrical compatibility.
Own architecture trades involving voltage level, topology, redundancy, fault containment, conversion stages, harnessing, mass, thermal performance, and mission reliability.
Establish electrical interface requirements between power generation, batteries, power electronics, avionics, propulsion, payloads, and external mission hardware.
Lead the technical evaluation and selection of converters, switches, relays, contactors, solid-state power controllers, protection devices, magnetics, capacitors, connectors, and other power system hardware.
Work directly with internal design teams and suppliers to resolve design, manufacturing, qualification, and test issues.
Review schematics, electrical designs, analysis, test plans, test data, and failure investigations.
Define verification strategies for power system requirements and ensure test programs meaningfully exercise expected and off-nominal operating conditions.
Support hardware bring-up, vehicle integration, environmental test, launch-site operations, commissioning, and on-orbit anomaly resolution.
Identify technical risks early and drive them to closure through analysis, test, redesign, or operational controls.
Serve as a technical authority for spacecraft power system decisions.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical standard of the broader electrical and systems engineering organization.
Communicate design status, risks, and recommendations clearly to engineering leadership and program management.