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Rocket Lab is seeking a Senior Manufacturing Engineer to drive manufacturing excellence in assembly and integration for rocket and spacecraft production. This role sits at the intersection of design and production, focusing on transforming early-stage concepts into scalable, manufacturable systems.
You will lead feasibility studies and manufacturing R&D projects to validate new production approaches. Partner closely with Design Engineering teams to embed Design for Manufacturability principles, ensuring products are robust and producible at scale. You'll engineer complete factory systems—from design through procurement, installation, and validation of assembly, test, and verification processes.
Ownership of production lines is central to this role. You'll remove blockers, improve yield, and increase build efficiency while supporting development builds to uncover early learnings and accelerate production ramp-up. When issues arise, you'll triage and diagnose failures, conduct deep technical investigations, and determine mitigation strategies and root cause resolutions.
Cross-functional collaboration is essential. You'll work with manufacturing, test, integration, and design teams to resolve complex, multifaceted problems. You'll drive process improvements across the factory, contribute to change management by assessing risk and impact of design or process changes, and support business system enhancements to increase organizational effectiveness.
Required: Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Mechatronics, Computer Engineering, or similar. 5+ years of technical experience in Manufacturing, Production, or Process Engineering. Hands-on problem-solving in complex manufacturing systems. Ability to manage multiple complex assignments autonomously. Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor others. Detailed technical knowledge of complex manufacturing processes.
Desirable: Experience with environmental acceptance/production acceptance testing (vibration, shock, thermal, vacuum). Understanding of instrumentation, interfaces, and sensors. Experience designing and implementing production lines. Product transition experience in fast-paced, iterative environments. Familiarity with DFMEA, PFMEA, Fault Tree Analysis, Pareto analysis, and root cause/corrective action methodologies.
