Engineer - Controls & Automation III

BLUE ORIGIN•Seattle, WA

1d•$130,706 - $182,988•Onsite

About The Position

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. Join our team of problem solvers as we add new chapters to the history of spaceflight! This role is part of Blue Origin Operations, which is comprised of Integrated Supply Chain, Test Operations, Safety, Quality, and Mission Assurance. This includes Manufacturing and Supply Chain support across all Blue Origin facilities. This role supports the design, development, and sustainment of the integrated control systems behind a family of advanced custom precision machines built entirely in-house at Blue Origin. These are not purchased tools with a service contract behind them — we architect them, build them, instrument them, break them, and make them production-worthy ourselves. Each system is a large-envelope, multi-axis, closed-loop precision platform, coordinating motion, thermal, fluid, and optical subsystems to hold micron-class positional accuracy — continuously, for weeks at a time, without operator intervention. The control system is what makes that possible. The hardware these machines produce goes directly into flight. When a machine holds its tolerances, we fly a rocket. That is the whole equation, and it is unusually short. You will join a small, senior, hands-on team that owns its hardware end to end. The machines are in production today and the next-generation configuration is in active design, which means you will work both problems at once: keeping a live fleet at rate while architecting the platform of the future. There is no wall between design and the floor here — you will write the logic, commission it, and stand next to the machine when it runs. Passion for our mission and vision is required.

Requirements

Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent
5+ years of experience with machine tool automation and industrial controls
Prior experience with PLC programming and HMI design
Prior experience creating, modifying, and delivering electrical schematics and P&ID drawings
Prior experience with industrial control networks (EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP)
Prior experience with servo motion control, including drive sizing, tuning, and encoder feedback
Working knowledge of machine safety requirements and their implementation in control logic
Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot a machine in operation, not only in simulation
Ability to earn trust, maintain positive and professional relationships, and contribute to a culture of inclusion
Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum

Nice To Haves

Prior experience designing and/or building custom and/or commercial machinery
Prior education or experience related to Control Theory and its applications
Prior experience implementing control solutions based on Beckhoff products and toolsets (TwinCAT 3, EtherCAT)
Prior experience with multi-axis coordinated motion controller platforms
Experience with dual-motor or gantry-coupled axes, including master/slave configurations, separation monitoring, and de-skew calibration
Experience with high-resolution linear encoder feedback — installation, alignment, contamination control, and diagnosis of intermittent feedback faults
Prior experience with coordinated systems where several independently-steered heads share one work envelope
Prior experience with functional safety over fieldbus (FSoE, SIL-rated architectures) and safety logic validation
Prior experience with sealed or controlled-atmosphere process equipment, including gas handling, purge, and containment controls
Prior experience developing production machine software in C++ or a comparable compiled language
Experience with large precision machine automation
Prior experience working to best practices of NFPA 70 and NFPA 79
Prior experience with configuration management of controller parameters and PLC code across a fleet of machines
Experience with machine commissioning and alignment campaigns
Experience taking a first-of-its-kind machine from prototype to repeatable production

Responsibilities

Own the control-system architecture of a two-controller machine — a motion controller carrying the coordinated servo and scanner axes alongside a PLC carrying process, material handling, and safety — including the interface between them and the handshake that sequences a build
Perform PLC software development and maintenance across numerous subsystems: fluid and gas flow and pressure, material handling, motion control, temperature control, machine and process diagnostics, data and error logging, human/machine interface, and safety logic
Develop and maintain coordinated multi-axis motion control, including master/slave electronically-coupled axes, separation monitoring, de-skew, and the servo tuning that keeps a large coupled structure stable under continuous duty
Develop, tune, and troubleshoot high-resolution encoder feedback chains, including diagnosis of intermittent and velocity-dependent feedback faults across an operating fleet
Build and maintain the error-mapping and calibration routines that correct position-dependent geometric error — squareness, yaw, droop, and thermal-growth effects — in large coupled-axis systems
Develop and maintain machine-side application software in C++ or comparable languages, including real-time and buffered execution where computation must stay ahead of machine motion
Build and maintain electrical schematics and P&ID drawings, and drawings of electrical cabinet layout and critical cable and wire routings
Work with internal and outsourced electricians for electrical cabinet assembly
Configure and maintain fieldbuses and fieldbus devices
Select, implement, and tune appropriately sized servo motors and drives as needed
Select and implement the sensors and actuators required to support machine operation
Design, implement, and validate machine safety logic over fieldbus — interlocks, emergency stop architecture, and the safe-state behavior a machine must hold on loss of communication or feedback — and verify that the machine and control system adhere to safety regulations and recommendations
Develop operator-facing HMI screens and diagnostics, with attention to whether the information an operator needs during a fault is actually visible to them
Instrument the machine for data capture, and build the logging and telemetry that make a fault reconstructable after the fact rather than only observable in the moment
Own the controls side of cross-discipline integration with mechanical, electrical, and process engineering; machine behavior cannot be understood from any one domain alone
Participate in subsystem- and machine-level testing including planning, execution, data reduction, and analysis
Perform and document root-cause analysis on controls-related field failures across an operating fleet, and drive the corrective change through release
Support commissioning and bring-up of new machines from power-on through production release
Support the retrofit and upgrade of fielded machines — designing change into hardware that is already in production, where downtime is measured against hardware deliveries
Maintain tight version control of drawings, source code, and machine configurations
Plan and manage work in accordance with team and company goals