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Salary: USD 200,000 - 225,000 / annual
Turion Space is building critical infrastructure for the space economy through vertically integrated hardware and software. The company develops DROID, a line of space vehicles, and Starfire, a comprehensive software suite for simulation, modeling, planning, and operations. As the company scales toward production of tens of vehicles per month while managing multiple vehicle development efforts in parallel, engineering practices must evolve beyond manual effort.
The Head of Software Tools owns the software layer of vehicle development: the tools, automation, AI, and data infrastructure enabling a lean team to design, analyze, build, and verify spacecraft at production rate. This is a player-coach role combining strategic vision-setting with hands-on technical contribution from day one.
Key responsibilities include: defining and driving strategy across analysis automation, design automation, systems tooling, applied AI, and engineering data infrastructure; recruiting and leading a small elite software engineering team while maintaining hands-on involvement in architecture and code; converting manual thermal, structural, vibration, and environmental analyses into parameterized, repeatable pipelines; automating CAD, ECAD, PDM/PLM, BOM, and engineering release processes; establishing requirements, verification, and trade study tooling for systems engineering; creating a unified digital thread linking requirements, CAD/ECAD, analysis models, test results, and vehicle configurations; building cloud and HPC infrastructure for simulation and AI workloads; and partnering with engineers across disciplines to identify high-value automation targets and measure cycle time and quality improvements.
Required qualifications: Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field; 8+ years of software engineering experience building internal tools, automation, or infrastructure for hardware engineering organizations (aerospace, defense, automotive); expert-level Python and working fluency in systems languages like C++; hands-on experience automating commercial CAD, CAE, or ECAD tools via APIs; depth in at least one engineering domain (thermal, structures, orbital mechanics, electronics); experience with modern data, cloud infrastructure, databases, CI/CD, and compute-heavy workloads; demonstrated technical leadership through architecture ownership, mentoring, or direct management.
Preferred: experience at spacecraft, launch, defense, or automotive companies that scaled production; familiarity with PLM and requirements systems (Teamcenter, Windchill, Duro, Jama, DOORS); HPC or cloud batch compute experience; applied AI/ML for engineering workflows.
