Avionics Design Lead
Houston, TX
About the Position:
We are seeking an experienced Avionics Design Lead to manage our high-performing team through the full hardware lifecycle. In this role, you will drive the design, manufacturing, assembly, and testing of critical flight hardware in a fast-paced environment. The primary focus of this position is overseeing the production of flight/test wire harnessing, printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), avionics box builds, and the final avionics integration onto our flight vehicles.
Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership
- Lead the design, development, integration, test, and qualification of avionics systems.
- Provide technical direction across avionics hardware, firmware, electrical systems, and mechanical interfaces.
- Lead and participate in engineering design reviews, including architecture, preliminary design, critical design, interface, manufacturing, test, and readiness reviews.
- Review and approve engineering designs, drawings, schematics, PCB layouts, software architectures, test plans, and technical documentation.
- Identify technical risks, drive resolution of complex engineering issues, and make sound engineering tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, cost, schedule, and manufacturability.
- Establish and maintain appropriate engineering standards, requirements, interfaces, verification methods, and configuration controls.
People Leadership & Development
- Directly manage and develop a team of avionics engineers.
- Set clear expectations, establish individual and team goals, and provide regular feedback and performance coaching.
- Recruit, onboard, train, and develop avionics engineering talent as the organization grows.
- Mentor engineers in technical development, engineering judgment, design practices, and problem-solving.
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Build team capabilities and staffing plans aligned with program and company needs.
Process & Continuous Improvement
- Create, implement, and continuously improve engineering processes, procedures, standards, and SOPs for avionics development and integration.
- Establish repeatable processes for design reviews, requirements management, configuration management, hardware/software releases, testing, troubleshooting, and documentation.
- Identifyprocess gaps and implement improvements that increase engineering velocity, quality, reliability, and scalability.
Program & Schedule Execution
- Oversee and maintain avionics development schedules, milestones, and deliverables.
- Coordinate engineering priorities and resources across multiple projects and development efforts.
- Track progress, identify schedule risks and dependencies, and proactively drive mitigation plans.
- Partner closely with program management, manufacturing, test, supply chain, quality, and other engineering disciplines to ensure on-time delivery.
- Communicate technical status, risks, decisions, and resource needs to engineering and company leadership.
Integration, Test & Flight Readiness
- Oversee avionics integration, bring-up, troubleshooting, verification, validation, and qualification activities.
- Support root-cause investigations and corrective actions for hardware and software failures.
- Support system-level integration and test campaigns, launch operations, and flight readiness activities as required.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Computer, Aerospace, Mechanical Engineering or a related technical discipline.
- 15+ years of relevant engineering experience, with significant experience in avionics, aerospace, spacecraft, launch vehicles, or another highly integrated hardware/software environment.
- 10+ years of direct supervisory experience leading engineers.
- Demonstrated experience leading multidisciplinary engineering efforts.
- Experience managing, mentoring, or technically leading engineers.
- Strong understanding of avionics hardware, firmware, and mechanical systems.
- Experience developing engineering processes, procedures, standards, or SOPs.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience developing avionics for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or other flight-critical systems.
- Experience with flight computers, power systems, telemetry, communications, sensors, data acquisition, command and control, or embedded systems.
- Experience with PCB design, electrical schematics, harnessing, wiring, and avionics integration.
- Familiarity with firmware development, real-time systems, and software/hardware interfaces.
- Experience with mechanical design reviews and electromechanical integration.
- Experience with environmental qualification, vibration, thermal, EMC/EMI, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
- Experience with requirements management, configuration management, and verification/validation.
- Experience taking hardware from concept through design, manufacturing, integration, test, and flight.
- Experience working at a rapidly growing aerospace or space technology company.
