Sr. Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

SpaceX, Hawthorne, CA

The role

Starshield leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads. On the Starshield Design Criteria Engineering team, you will ensure that our satellites achieve mission success with high reliability. This team draws from diverse engineering backgrounds to become deeply familiar with hardware from the vehicle system to individual components. These skills will be applied across the two roles we are hiring for:

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Sr. Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

SpaceX, Hawthorne, CA

Posted pay

$135K–$190K

a year

Location: Hawthorne, CA
Work type: Not given
Level: Senior
Experience: 5+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
SQL
Excel
MATLAB
Posted: Jun 30, 2026
Last check: 2 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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SpaceX

Open tech jobs: 876
With posted pay: 69%
Median posted base: $125K–$195K

About SpaceX: funding, hiring and pay

SpaceX

About SpaceX: funding, hiring and pay

Company facts

Money raised: $6.8BSum of funding rounds on record
Newest round: Funding roundJun 13, 2022

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

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The role

What you will do

Develop and own design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches for new satellite systems. Continuously improve these processes with stakeholder engagement.
Perform critical peer review of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns, and approve plans based on the strength of technical justification that hardware is ready for launch.
Guide engineers through the SpaceX design process and ensure design criteria/requirements are being followed for satellite design, manufacturing, and test activities.
Provide development input such as analysis or test recommendations on a wide range of engineering problems encompassing electrical, structural, and radio frequency systems.
Leverage involvement in broad spectrum of development efforts to be an expert resource for defining vehicle maturity status in key program reviews and communications.
Proactively identify development risks, then implement and track mitigation plans.
Develop and own long-term strategy to enable satellite and infrastructure changes, while providing daily engineering support and surge coverage for critical issues.
Leverage comprehensive expertise in the satellite system architecture to ensure vehicle-wide and atomic changes improve rather than degrade the satellite.
Review analysis and test validation approaches across a range of disciplines including electrical, mechanical, and radio frequency systems to build strong justifications for all changes.
Own configuration management for the satellites to ensure bill of materials accuracy for both as-designed and as-built configurations and all changes therein.
Provide critical input to ensure change implementation across the fleet of satellite variants is efficient and practical; ensure scope and impacts across design, manufacturing, supply chain, and test are identified and assigned; and follow-up to confirm thorough closure.
Serve as the primary expert for tracking and conveying history of all changes and other system-level considerations in key program reviews and investigations.
Develop specialized tools that enable design, analysis, and milestone tracking.

Sr. Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

The role

Sr. Design Criteria Engineer (Starshield)

The role

What you will do

What you need

Basic qualifications

Additional requirements

Itar requirements

Nice to have

Pay and benefits

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