SpaceX Mechanical Engineer for Starship Structures at SpaceX responsible for designing and building flight hardware including primary structures and propellant tanks. Owns end-to-end design and collaborates with production teams.
Responsibilities
Develop design concepts from a clean sheet and size vehicle structures based on flight loads
Collaborate with peers from different vehicle systems to develop designs that balance mass, cost, and capability
Create detailed designs to implement structural concepts and generate CAD models in NX for components, assemblies, and vehicle integration
Build finite element models to assess your designs in detail and analyze your structures to prove they meet the needs of the vehicle
Apply first-order hand calculations and empirical formulas to assess and iterate on your designs rapidly
Validate your designs by building development articles to test individual joints and design elements for strength
Perform structural testing on subassemblies and full sections of the airframe
Partner with build engineers and technicians to improve your designs
Support the assembly of your hardware in the factory, witness your designs being brought to life daily, and watch them take flight and make history
Qualification
Demonstrated rapid growth
Required
Bachelor's degree in mechanical or aerospace engineering
1+ years of engineering experience designing, analyzing, or building structures (internship and school projects experience qualify)
Preferred
Strong ability to use data and analysis to make fast data-driven decisions
Strong understanding of engineering fundamentals
Ability to perform trade studies and make clear recommendations using first principles and engineering fundamentals even with partial information
Experience working at a nimble engineering organization or in a highly technical position that required a scrappy, entrepreneurial manner to accomplish tasks with tight time or budget constraints
Experience building hardware or have a passion for contributing to a work product that operates in the real world
Demonstrated rapid growth; you’ve held successive positions of increasing responsibility within an organization, were able to get yourself up to speed at a heroic pace, and accomplished something meaningfully difficult early in your career
You’ve demonstrated resilience and the ability to overcome failure or extreme odds. Many critics would say that our goals are impossible but this isn’t the first time we’ve proven that highly improbable goals like reusable rockets can become possible
Experience leading or working on an engineering competition team, i.e. Formula SAE, Baja SAE, RoboSub, Combat Robotics or similar
