How You’ll Fulfill Your Mission

• Participate and guide system design and development at all stages of development lifecycle
• Use Systems Engineering methods and tools to develop systems engineering products such as requirements decomposition, system architecture; specifications, systems engineering and program plans, interfaces, risk assessment and mitigation, validation and verification planning, overall integration, etc.
• Apply interdisciplinary, collaborative approaches to plan, coordinate, design, develop and verify complex systems solutions
• Develop system-level trade studies to inform Astra’s product roadmap, specifying the most important high-level features of the next iterations of our launch system
• Run and analyze trajectories and other system analyses for future rockets and launch sites
• Develop architectural diagrams and products like Concept of Operations and system use cases to establish architecture definition and design
• Participate in specialty engineering (operability, reliability, maintainability, supportability) integration, analysis and verification
• Implement verification & validation and master test plans
• Lead teams to define and disseminate interface control documentation, allowing systems to communicate effectively as we scale faster than ever
• Engage with leads and teammates across engineering disciplines
• Assist with definition and coordination of system performance requirements and technical parameters.
• You will truly enjoy what you do, be flexible and communicative. This role has extensive cross-functional interaction to drive strategies down to execution while keeping up the pace of Astra. 

Qualifications

• 12+ years system development/integration experience on complex autonomous systems – preferably with aerospace hardware
• Expertise with system architecture, requirements, interface definition, verification, and validation, risk, issues and opportunities management and trade studies.
• Experience configuring and owning systems engineering tools such as JAMA, DOORS, DNG, or similar
• Experience system modeling and performance analysis tools
• Experience working with different development processes and comfortable authoring new processes
• You are not afraid of technical details, you learn fast, and you are motivated to understand every aspect of your product
• You thoughtfully and thoroughly engage all stakeholders in decision-making and effectively build alignment around decisions
• You bring a structured approach to ambiguous problems, turning head-scratchers into solvable problems with clear next steps
• You know how to balance rigor with speed and can mentor others across the engineering organization
• You are comfortable being responsible for the system architecture of one or more of Astra’s product lines
• You know how to lead people who don’t report to you
• B.S. degree in engineering or another technical field

Desired Multipliers

• M.S or PhD in engineering or another technical field relevant to orbital launch vehicles or satellites
• Hands on hardware test and integration experience
• Experience in reliability, maintainability and supportability analysis and execution
• Experience working with trajectory optimization and/or orbital mechanics
• System Safety analysis experience including Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis, Fault Tree Analysis, and Functional Hazard Analysis
• Demonstrated configuration management experience
• Experience in high growth / startup environments