Welding Engineer

SpaceX•Hawthorne, CA

2d•$100,000 - $140,000•Onsite

About The Position

This position will support manufacturing and development of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship launch vehicles, Dragon spacecraft, and Starlink satellites alongside a strong group of design and build engineers. The person in this position will help develop, qualify, and optimize welding designs and processes including but not limited to electron beam welding, laser beam welding, gas tungsten arc welding, orbital tube welding, resistance welding, gas metal arc welding, and plasma arc welding. The welding engineer in this role will interface daily with design and manufacturing engineers to make welding judgment calls and improvements and will enforce standardized practices and procedures on multiple welded assemblies.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in an engineering discipline
Hands-on fabrication, manufacturing, or testing experience of welded assemblies

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in welding engineering or related technical program
Hands on welding experience of stainless steel, nickel-based, titanium, copper, and aluminum alloys
Experience with brazing, joining, and metallographic interpretation
Fundamental understanding of welding processes including, but not limited to, electron beam, laser beam, plasma arc, resistance, friction-stir, gas tungsten arc, and gas metal arc
Robot programming experience for automated welding solutions
Tooling design experience for welded assemblies to reduce part distortion and improve part consistency
Understanding of weld strength testing methodologies, standards, and data acquisition systems used to make informed welding decisions (ASTM E8, E399, E740, ISO 15653, AWS D17.X, AWS C7.X, thermos-couples, strain gages, etc.)
Experience with root cause analysis and corrective actions including, but not limited to, optical and SEM fractography/metallography, hardness, chemical analysis, and mechanical testing
Self-motivated engineer with keen attention to detail

Responsibilities

Develop, optimize, and qualify weld processes and parameters for multiple welding processes including but not limited to electron beam welding, laser beam welding, gas tungsten arc welding, orbital tube welding, resistance welding, gas metal arc welding, friction stir welding, and plasma arc welding
Support production operations on full scale welded assemblies, providing direction to manufacturing engineers and welders on correct techniques in a fast paced manufacturing environment
Support design, manufacturing, and materials engineering with root cause analysis
Work closely with design, tooling, automation, and development engineers to improve welded designs for manufacturing
Set up welding qualification test campaigns and interpret mechanical testing and NDE results
Work closely with NDE personnel to interpret weld quality on development and flight hardware in addition to developing and implementing innovative state-of-the-art NDE techniques
Develop and implement improved process control where possible using test and NDE results as feedback loop
Set up automated welding solutions in an effort to drive process consistency
Scope out new welding technologies that may be employed to improve rate/quality/efficiency