Your circuit board will wake up on the lunar surface next year.
You’ll design the electronics and flight software that bring our 2027 lunar payload to life: commanding the ISRU brick fabrication process, inflating a habitat bladder, and getting data back to Earth.
\*\*What you’ll do:\*\*
\* Design the avionics stack: controller boards, power distribution, sensor interfaces and valve actuation electronics.
\* Write the flight software for payload sequencing, closed-loop process control, and fault management.
\* Own the electrical interface to the CLPS lander (power, data, commanding, telemetry formatting).
\* Select and qualify components for the lunar radiation and thermal environment.
\* Design and build harnessing, including a lunar umbilical cord exposed on the Moon for our deployable payload.
\*\*What we’re looking for:\*\*
\* Experience designing mixed-signal PCBs from schematic through layout, fabrication, and bring-up (full-cycle).
\* RS-485 / serial protocol design: you can write a protocol ICD and define baud rate, framing, CRC, and fault handling from scratch.
\* Flight software in C/C++ on microcontrollers: state machines, FDIR, watchdog logic, closed-loop control.
\* Familiarity with spaceflight-adjacent standards for wiring, grounding, and EMI/EMC.
\* Power electronics: 28 Vdc conditioning, inrush limiting, motor driver integration, and power budget analysis.
\* Harness design: MIL-STD-38999 connectors, EMI/EMC compliance, thermal-rated wire and insulation (Kapton/PTFE), shielding continuity.
\* Comfort operating across the hardware/software boundary: you can debug a board with an oscilloscope and a JTAG probe.
\* You’ve built flight hardware before
\* Excellent communication skills
\*\*Must haves:\*\*
\* Experience architecting an avionics system from scratch that flew into space: you've taken a design from concept to launch and can point to it.
\* Full-cycle PCB design: schematic through layout, fab, bring-up, and in-system debug.
\*\*Nice to haves:\*\*
\* Experience writing ICDs and technical documentation delivered to a vehicle or launch provider.
\* Familiarity with actuator drive electronics (brushed DC motors, NEA/pyro devices) or compressed-gas systems.
\* Comfortable interfacing with mechanical design teams.
\* Onboard data storage design: NAND flash, wear leveling, downlink queue management.
\* Experience with radiation-tolerant or rad-hard component selection.
\* You can drink from the fire hose.
\*\*ITAR Requirements\*\*
To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
Role details (from YC):
Compensation: $125 - $175 · 0.25% - 0.75%
Experience: 1+ years
Visa: US citizen/visa only
Skills: C, C++