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Salary: USD 140,000 - 185,000 / annual
Cowboy Space Corporation is building space-based solar energy infrastructure using modular, scalable satellites in Low Earth Orbit. The company transmits energy via infrared lasers, powers on-orbit high-performance computing clusters, and provides secure optical data transport. Founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt (co-founder of Robinhood), the company has raised ~$365M from top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The team includes veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Astranis, and NASA.
As the first Reliability Engineer, you will establish the reliability framework for the company's launch vehicle and space systems program. Rather than inheriting processes, you will decide which industry-standard reliability practices apply to this lean, fast-moving team and which add friction without value. You will own failure analysis across the vehicle and engines, identifying single points of failure, evaluating redundancy trades, and assessing test data margins. You will work embedded with propulsion, structures, and avionics engineers rather than in a separate assurance organization.
Key responsibilities include: defining the reliability toolkit and documenting it concisely; selecting appropriate analysis depth per subsystem (FMECA for critical interfaces, one-page walkthroughs for others); conducting FMEA/FMECA, fault tree analysis, and single-point-failure identification; understanding the physics of failure in cryogenic propellant systems (LOX, LNG), thermal cycling, fatigue, and contamination; defining test objectives and instrumentation requirements before hardware builds; running fast failure review and corrective action processes; building lightweight Python-based tools; and mentoring engineers to think about failure modes early in design.
You will need 5–8 years of reliability, mission assurance, or systems engineering experience on hardware where failure had real consequences. Core competencies include FMECA, fault tree analysis, common-cause analysis, Weibull and life-data analysis, and physics-of-failure reasoning. You should have hands-on test experience, Python proficiency for Monte Carlo simulations and data analysis, statistical rigor, and the judgment to right-size processes. A bachelor's degree in engineering is required. Launch vehicle or liquid rocket engine experience (especially cryogenic), rotating machinery reliability (turbopumps, bearings, seals), propulsion/structural test experience, and experience standing up a reliability function from scratch are highly valued.
