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Salary: USD 82,400 - 103,000 / annual
Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company building rockets, spacecraft, and critical subsystems for missions ranging from interplanetary exploration to national security and defense. The Space Systems team has enabled over 1,700 missions and works with partners including NASA, the Space Development Agency, and the U.S. Space Force.
The Harness Design Engineer I role is based at Rocket Lab's headquarters in Long Beach, CA and focuses on electrical harness design for spacecraft and space systems. This is a dual-responsibility position combining harness design and avionics support.
Harness Design Responsibilities:
- Perform or support harness layout, connector and back shell selection, wire selection, and shielding design for spacecraft
- Generate pinout tables for harness connectors based on spacecraft interconnect diagrams
- Create and maintain bills of materials (BOMs) for harnesses in the product lifecycle management (PLM) tool
- Assist in creating documentation for electrical system schematics and harness designs
Avionics Support Responsibilities:
- Develop test plans and procedures for avionics subsystems and components
- Perform analysis and evaluations to optimize spacecraft avionics circuits for performance, reliability, and manufacturability
- Participate in internal design reviews and customer-facing meetings as an avionics electrical engineering team representative
- Work in multi-disciplinary teams to assist in design of electronic assemblies for satellite and spacecraft programs
The role involves heavy involvement in electronics and provides exposure to the full spectrum of electrical engineering activities for spacecraft and space systems components, including circuit design, analysis, prototyping, and testing.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in aerospace, mechanical, electrical engineering, or other engineering discipline
- Experience with electrical engineering or avionics
Nice-to-Have Qualifications:
- Master's or PhD in aerospace, mechanical, electrical engineering, or related field
- Experience in the aerospace/defense industry
- Experience supporting satellite development programs and satellite operations
- Thorough understanding of space environment, orbital mechanics, and rigid body dynamics
- Experience with LT Spice, Altium, and/or Siemens software suite (Teamcenter)
- Experience with requirement management tools such as JAMA
- Experience with testing electrical subsystems and assemblies, including thermal vacuum, random vibration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing
- Proficiency in electronics principles and electrical systems, including power electronics, communication systems (RS-422, SPI, Ethernet, CAN bus), signal integrity, and grounding
- Proficiency with instrumentation, interfaces, and sensors (power supplies, oscilloscopes, serial devices, accelerometers, thermocouples, RTDs, 4-20mA sensors)
- Ability to work in dynamic environments with competing priorities
Note: This position requires U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residency, or eligibility to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State and/or Commerce due to ITAR regulations governing space technology exports.
