Avionics Engineer; Power Electronics

• Location: Carson, CA

• Employment Type: Full-time

• Department: Starlight

• Travel: Occasional

Starpath is building the technology to enable human expansion into the Solar System. We are developing systems that will produce the water, power, and oxygen needed for humans to live and work on the Moon and Mars. Our ultimate goal is to build and operate a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Starlight is our space solar product. Our goal is to build the lowest-cost, highest-performance space solar power system—one capable of powering most new satellites around Earth and all Starpath equipment on the Moon and Mars.

We are looking for a Power Electronics Avionics Engineer to own the design of Starlight’s power electronics. Your immediate responsibility will be to develop a power converter from system architecture through qualification and production.

You will own the converter’s topology, component selection, magnetics, control loops, sensing, protection circuitry, PCB design, thermal performance, and electrical interfaces. This is a hands-on role that includes circuit design, simulation, hardware bring-up, testing, and failure investigation in close collaboration with systems, mechanical, manufacturing, and test engineers.

• Own the design of a power converter for the Starlight solar array product from requirements through flight readiness

• Translate system-level requirements into converter architecture and detailed electrical requirements

• Select converter topologies and components based on efficiency, power density, reliability, mass, cost, and manufacturability

• Design switching power stages, gate-drive circuits, magnetics, control loops, sensing, filtering, and protection circuitry

• Perform circuit modeling, simulation, stability analysis, component derating, and worst-case analysis

• Own schematic capture and power-electronics PCB layout, including high-current paths, switching nodes, grounding, isolation, thermal management, and EMI control

• Build, bring up, characterize, and debug converter prototypes

• Develop and execute tests for efficiency, regulation, transient response, stability, thermal performance, emissions, and fault behavior

• Design for launch and space environments, including vibration, thermal vacuum, radiation, and electromagnetic compatibility

• Define electrical interfaces between the solar array, converter, spacecraft power system, and avionics

• Investigate failures, determine root causes, and implement design improvements

• Partner with manufacturing and supply-chain teams to transition the design into reliable production

• Maintain schematics, bills of materials, analyses, interface documentation, and test and qualification records

• 3+ years of professional experience designing power electronics or power-conversion hardware

• Experience taking a power converter from architecture through prototype, bring-up, and testing

• Strong understanding of switch-mode power-converter topologies, control-loop design, magnetics, power semiconductors, and gate-drive design

• Experience with current and voltage sensing, feedback networks, filtering, isolation, and hardware protection circuits

• Strong understanding of grounding, parasitics, switching behavior, power integrity, and EMI/EMC fundamentals

• Experience designing or directing the layout of multilayer power-electronics PCBs

• Hands-on experience using oscilloscopes, electronic loads, power supplies, network analyzers, current probes, and differential probes

• Experience with circuit simulation, tolerance analysis, hardware bring-up, and root-cause investigation

• Degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent professional experience

• A desire to make humans a multi-planet…