Manufacturing System Engineer

Digital Systems & Operations|Alameda, CA (On-site)|Full-Time

Department: Manufacturing

Reports To: Head of Operations & Manufacturing

Classification: Exempt, Full-Time

Location: Alameda, CA — On-site (manufacturing environment)

ITAR Requirement: Must be a U.S. Person per 22 CFR 120.62 (U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident) due to access to export-controlled technical data

Astra Space Systems designs and manufactures spacecraft propulsion and launch systems. Our Spacecraft Engines line is in serial production and scaling toward high-volume rates; our Launch Rocket is progressing through design validation toward first flight. We run a modern digital manufacturing stack — Odoo 17 ERP, ION MES, and PLM — within an AS9100-aligned quality system, and we are investing heavily in AI-driven operations intelligence.

Astra is hiring a Manufacturing & Industrial Engineer to industrialize Spacecraft Engine production — engineering the processes, factory flow, capacity, and manufacturing systems required to reach true high-volume rate, and preparing the production system that will build our Launch Rocket.

This role is grounded in classical industrial and manufacturing engineering: process definition and standard work, time studies and line balancing, factory layout and material flow, capacity and constraint analysis, tooling and workstation design, and rate-readiness planning. What makes it different is the toolset: you will encode your process engineering directly into Odoo 17, ION MES, and PLM, and leverage Claude (Anthropic) and related AI platforms to model capacity, detect constraints, assess schedule risk, and deliver decision-ready production intelligence in real time.

Our planned AI-driven growth only works if it is built on sound manufacturing engineering. Routings, standard times, work centers, and BOMs are the foundation every metric and AI-generated insight stands on — and in this role, you own that foundation.

• Define and optimize manufacturing processes — process flow, operation sequencing, standard work, and documentation that scales cleanly to high-volume production.
• Perform time studies, line balancing, and takt analysis — establishing accurate standard times and the operating cadence for each production rate step.
• Design factory layout and material flow — work cells, point-of-use material, WIP staging, and flow paths that minimize travel, handling, and queue time as volume grows.
• Build capacity and constraint models across equipment, tooling, test stands, and labor — identifying bottlenecks and defining the investments required at each rate milestone.
• Develop the rate-readiness roadmap — industrialization plan with process maturity gates, labor-hour and learning-curve models, and triggers for automation and robotics investment.

• Own routings, work instructions, and travelers with production and quality — engineering operations, standard times, work centers, buy-off points, and data capture deliberately, synchronized with engineering change.
• Partner with design engineering on producibility — design-for-manufacturing feedback, production impact assessment of engineering changes, and clean BOM incorporation from PLM to the factory.
• Specify tooling, fixtures, and workstation equipment to improve repeatability, reduce cycle time, and design out error opportunities at the bench.
• Spend regular time on the floor — walking builds, observing work order execution in ION MES, and correcting the process or the data when the physical and digital diverge.
• Lead continuous improvement via value-stream mapping, constraint analysis, and lean / Theory of Constraints — measured in cycle time, first-pass yield, WIP, and throughput.

• Serve as process authority for the digital stack — governing operation types, routings, work centers, BOMs, inventory routes, and lot/serial traceability across Odoo 17, ION MES, and PLM so the systems model the factory as it actually runs.
• Own master data and the digital thread — part numbers, revisions, and BOM alignment between PLM,…