Sr. Radiation Effects Engineer, Project Sunrise

Blue Origin • Littleton, CO

2d

About The Position

This role is part of Advanced Concepts and Enterprise Engineering (ACE), supporting Blue Origin’s mission of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. The team fosters innovation and drives engineering workflows of the future, shared solutions and standards, simplicity and lower costs, and manufacturable design. Join Blue Origin as we build infrastructure in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re developing a satellite constellation of orbital data centers, Sunrise, designed to transform how compute infrastructure is deployed and leveraged. We are seeking a subject matter expert in radiation effects to lead the effort of ensuring this cutting-edge commercial hardware can operate reliably in the harsh environment of space. You will be responsible for the entire radiation effects lifecycle for the complete compute payload—from characterizing the environment and developing novel mitigation strategies to planning and executing test campaigns for all its advanced hardware. This is a mission-critical role for an engineer who is excited to solve first-principles problems and establish the Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) playbook for deploying high-performance COTS electronics in space.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in Physics, Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years of professional experience as a Radiation Effects Engineer for space applications.
• Deep understanding of radiation effects, including Total Ionizing Dose (TID), Single Event Effects (SEE), and displacement damage, particularly in advanced CMOS nodes.
• Demonstrated, hands-on experience qualifying Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components for radiation tolerance.
• Experience using industry-standard radiation environment modeling tools.
• 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

• Master’s or Ph.D. in a relevant discipline.
• 10-14+ years of experience in a senior radiation effects role.
• Direct experience planning and executing test campaigns at major accelerator facilities.
• Specific experience analyzing radiation effects on a variety of complex hardware, such as SoCs, FPGAs, GPUs, high-density memory, or high-speed transceivers.
• Familiarity with relevant industry standards for radiation testing and qualification (e.g., MIL-STD-883, JEDEC, NASA EEE-INST-002).
• Proven ability to lead a comprehensive test and qualification campaign from planning to completion.

Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and execute the Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) Plan for the entire compute payload.
• Characterize the mission's orbital radiation environment using tools like CREME96, SPENVIS, or other approaches and translate those models into component-level test requirements.
• Define and own the end-to-end radiation mitigation strategy, establishing a design margin policy and working with designers on part selection, shielding, and fault tolerance schemes.
• Translate device-level single event effects (SEEs) into system-level impacts such as data corruption, reset rates, or degraded performance, and work with systems engineers to bound their effect.
• Plan, schedule, and execute radiation effects test campaigns at accelerator facilities, managing the long-lead logistics required for beam time.
• Maintain the radiation risk register, part-by-part test status, and all supporting analyses to inform design reviews and flight-readiness decisions.
• Collaborate with hardware, software, and EEE parts engineering teams to ensure mitigation strategies are seamlessly integrated into the system design.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior