POSITION DETAILS
- Location: Los Angeles (Hawthorne), CA
- Employment Type: Full-time
- Department: Starlight Solar
- Travel: Occasional
THE MISSION
Starpath develops and manufactures the technologies that will enable humans to live on the Moon and Mars. Today, we are building robotic systems that locally produce the essential commodities a lunar civilization will require at extreme scale: water, power, and oxygen. Our ultimate goal is to build and operate a self-sustaining city on Mars.
SENIOR MECHANICAL ENGINEER (ROTARY ACTUATORS) – SPACE SOLAR
The Starlight team is focused on dramatically improving space solar power to support Starpath’s core mission and the broader space economy. Starlight manufactures the lowest-cost, highest-performance space solar power systems, which will power the majority of new satellites built on Earth and all of Starpath’s equipment on the Moon and Mars.
As a Senior Mechanical Engineer focused on rotary actuators, you will own the architecture, design, analysis, and qualification of the mechanisms that deploy and orient Starlight’s solar arrays. These include solar array drive assemblies, deployment hinges, dampers, latches, and gimbals that must survive launch and operate reliably throughout the mission.
You will serve as a technical authority for spacecraft mechanisms, resolve complex design and integration challenges, and guide hardware from early trade studies through flight qualification and production.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Own rotary actuator and mechanism designs from architecture through detailed design, analysis, build, qualification, and flight
- Establish mechanism requirements and translate system-level needs into practical hardware architectures
- Lead technical trade studies covering performance, mass, reliability, manufacturability, cost, and schedule
- Select and integrate motors, gearheads, bearings, slip rings, brakes, dampers, and position sensors
- Size drivetrains for torque, speed, stiffness, backlash, pointing accuracy, jitter, duty cycle, and mission life
- Perform and review torque-margin, friction, structural, thermal, backlash, life, and tolerance analyses using hand calculations and FEA
- Develop lubrication, materials, surface-treatment, preload, and wear-control strategies for vacuum and thermal-cycling environments
- Define qualification and acceptance-test programs covering functional performance, life, vibration, shock, thermal vacuum, and torque margin
- Lead mechanism design reviews, failure investigations, risk-reduction efforts, and corrective actions
- Partner with electrical, controls, and avionics engineers on motor-drive electronics, feedback sensing, fault response, and closed-loop actuator control
- Work with manufacturing and suppliers to develop assembly, alignment, inspection, and production processes for precision rotating hardware
- Identify critical technical risks early and build focused development tests to resolve them
- Mentor engineers and establish sound mechanism-design and verification practices across the team
- Simplify designs, reduce part count, and eliminate complexity that does not improve performance or reliability
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, or a related discipline
- 6+ years of professional experience designing mechanisms, actuators, or precision mechanical systems
- Demonstrated ownership of complex mechanical hardware from concept through build and test
- Experience designing rotary mechanisms such as actuators, gearboxes, gimbals, hinges, deployment systems, or drive assemblies
- Strong understanding of motors, gear reductions, bearings, lubrication, friction, backlash, stiffness, and mechanism life
- Proficiency with 3D CAD and the ability to produce detailed engineering drawings using GD&T
- Experience performing mechanical analysis using hand calculations and FEA
- Hands-on experience building, testing, troubleshooting, and improving mechanical hardware
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