Principal Electrical Design Engineer, Customer Hardware (Starlink)

About the position

At SpaceX we're leveraging our experience in building rockets and spacecraft to deploy Starlink, the world's most advanced broadband internet system. Starlink is the world's largest satellite constellation that provides fast, reliable internet to millions of users worldwide. We design, build, test, and operate all parts of the system - thousands of satellites, consumer receivers that allow users to connect within minutes of unboxing, and the software that brings it all together. We've only begun to scratch the surface of Starlink's potential global impact and are looking for best-in-class engineers to help maximize Starlink's utility for communities and businesses around the globe. As a Principal Electrical Design Engineer on the consumer product team, you'll have complete ownership over the development of millions of consumer-facing devices (Starlink dishes/user terminals, Wi-Fi routers, etc.). Our customers currently include teachers in the most remote parts of the Amazon, researchers in Antarctica, digital nomads who travel via RV, emergency responders, commercial airlines, cruise lines, and residential users who live in more rural or developing areas. You will be responsible for the design, implementation, and verification of the entire electrical system. You will interact regularly with senior leadership to influence the fundamental operation of our constellation and network while collaborating with electrical, silicon, software, mechanical, and manufacturing teams to steer this project from initial concept development to full-scale production.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and test highly reliable electronics for communicating with our satellites
• Partner with software, mechanical, thermal, manufacturing, and production test teams
• Drive system trades, requirements capture, component selection, analysis, schematic capture, PCB layout, prototyping, hardware bring-up, debugging, documentation, manufacturing, and test of complex electrical designs
• Get hands-on and support hardware through production, satellite integration, and flight
• Work closely with engineers from adjacent disciplines (mechanical, thermal, software, test engineering, supply chain, silicon design, etc.) to deliver tightly integrated, high-performance hardware
• Drive continual improvements to our designs by building physical and digital tools to analyze data collected on orbit and in the lab
• Challenge assumptions and work to find simple solutions to complex problems

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer engineering
• 8+ years of professional experience designing circuits, electronic products, or hardware

Nice-to-haves

• Master's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or similar engineering degree
• 10+ years of professional experience rapidly designing and delivering highly reliable products
• 10+ years of electronic product experience designing hardware from concept through production; strong emphasis on full life cycle development of new hardware products and not small incremental updates to legacy hardware
• 10+ years of experience designing and implementing mixed-signal circuit boards from concept through production using processors, FPGAs, Ethernet, multi-GHz Serdes, DRAM interfaces (DDR4), I2C, SPI, operational amplifiers, analog to digital and digital to analog converters, and power supply components
• 10+ years of professional experience testing, troubleshooting, and debugging electronics
• Strong understanding of computers and programming languages (Python, C/C++)
• Demonstrated ability to work in a highly cross-functional role