Senior Spacecraft Systems Engineer

Description

Amazon Leo is Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite network. Our mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet connectivity to customers beyond the reach of existing networks. From individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies, Amazon Leo serves people and organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.

Amazon Leo’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) and Propulsion team designs, tests, and flies the systems that point, maneuver, and safely deorbit every satellite in the fleet. In this role you will own system-level engineering across those functions, covering electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics, for multiple satellite configurations at once. The work reaches past one subsystem: you will set the requirements and budgets that bound each function, define how they interface with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, and carry those decisions through verification, launch, and on-orbit operation. Satellites built to earlier configurations are flying today while later ones are in design, so you will reason about both at the same time and keep decisions consistent between them. These systems are interdisciplinary by construction: thruster physics, control algorithms, flight software, and ground operations are coupled tightly enough that the hardest problems sit at the seams between disciplines rather than inside any one of them.

Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Key job responsibilities
- Own the requirements and the configuration-controlled technical baseline for electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics: derive requirements from mission and spacecraft needs, manage flow-down and traceability to subsystems, and adjudicate changes to the baseline as satellite configurations evolve
- Own the interdisciplinary analysis that resolves allocations across disciplines: build and maintain the system budgets and margins (mass, power, propellant, total impulse, pointing, on-orbit lifetime), and drive the cross-functional trade studies that weigh design and operational options against them
- Define and maintain the interfaces these functions hold with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, including interface control documents (ICDs) and command and telemetry definitions
- Establish the verification and test strategy across hardware and software, from ground test and hardware-in-the-loop through on-orbit evidence, and lead fault management work including failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR)
- Define the metrics and technical performance measures for these systems, use them to drive design, test, and operational decisions, and drive the system through its design and readiness reviews

A day in the life
You sit with the engineers who design, test, and operate this hardware rather than at a distance from them, on a Redmond campus where the thermal vacuum chambers and avionics benches are a walk or a short ride away. Telemetry from satellites already in orbit arrives daily, and the questions it raises land next to questions about hardware that has not been built yet, so your attention moves between the fleet that is flying and the configuration that follows it. Collaborators include propulsion and attitude control designers, flight software, flight dynamics, power, thermal, mechanical, avionics, test, manufacturing, and the flight operations engineers who run the fleet, along with supplier partners. The cadence follows production and launch, which means decisions get made on real schedules and you see the result of yours fly. The configurations you work across sit at different life cycle phases at the same time, so one conversation can be about a flight anomaly and the next about a design that is still on paper.

About the team
The GNC and Propulsion team owns how every Amazon Leo satellite points itself, changes its orbit, avoids other objects, and leaves orbit at end of life. We build our own propulsion and attitude control systems rather than buying them, we operate them across a growing fleet, and we feed what we learn in orbit back into the next configuration. Over the coming years the team scales these systems to a larger fleet across more vehicle configurations while raising how much of the work is automated and data-driven.

Basic Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or an equivalent field
- 7+ years of spacecraft or aerospace systems engineering experience
- Experience with spacecraft attitude determination and control, including sensors, actuators, and control modes
- Experience establishing system-level requirements for a new design
- Experience defining and documenting interfaces between subsystems that combine hardware and software
- Experience establishing test strategy for a system that combines hardware and software
- Experience with physics-based modeling and analysis of complex systems

Preferred Qualifications

- Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in aerospace engineering, systems engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, or a related discipline
- Depth in electric propulsion systems such as Hall effect thrusters or ion engines, including power processing units and propellant feed systems
- Depth in attitude determination and control, including pointing and stability budgets, control mode design, and sensor and actuator selection
- Experience with orbit determination, maneuver planning, conjunction assessment, or deorbit analysis for an operating satellite fleet
- Experience assessing an existing system to identify missing requirements, incomplete designs, or architecture changes spanning multiple subsystems that improve performance, robustness, or extensibility
- Experience framing complex problems to reduce ambiguity for technical teams and decision makers, and creating reusable artifacts or templates that let other teams work faster
- Experience leading or reviewing the work of design or test teams
- Experience maintaining a technical baseline and requirements traceability across two or more concurrent vehicle configurations, using tools such as Jama, DOORS, or a Systems Modeling Language (SysML) based environment
- Proficiency with scripting (Python, MATLAB, or an equivalent language) for analysis and data visualization
- Experience supporting on-orbit operations, commissioning, or anomaly investigations on a flight program that is also in high-rate production

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.