Reliability Engineer

Reliability Engineer

About Cowboy Space Corporation

Mission

Cowboy Space Corporation is solving the global energy crisis by building the infrastructure for abundant, resilient space-based solar energy. We are tackling one of humanity’s most complex engineering challenges with a world-class team dedicated to delivering a revolutionary power platform. Cowboy Space Corporation is transforming how civilization powers, computes and connects - from orbit to Earth.

Background

Cowboy Space Corporation is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our modular, scalable satellites collect sunlight in Low Earth Orbit to enable multiple integrated applications: transmitting energy via infrared lasers (space-to-earth and space-to-space), powering on-orbit high-performance computing clusters (GPU/TPU), and providing secure, high bandwidth optical data transport.

Current energy and data systems rely on complex logistics and outdated infrastructure. Cowboy Space Corporation overcomes these challenges by enabling direct, on-demand, secure, and scalable energy distribution and data processing from space. This will revolutionize how we operate in orbit and on Earth, supporting the rapidly expanding space industrial base, ISAM (In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing) operations, remote regions, and military bases.

Baiju Bhatt founded Cowboy Space Corporation in 2024. Inspired by his father’s work with NASA Langley Research Center, Baiju earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics at Stanford before co-founding Robinhood, now a public company that has helped over 20 million Americans access the financial system. Cowboy Space Corporation has raised ~$365 million from Index Ventures, Interlagos, Construct Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and others.

This is an ambitious mission that demands extraordinary talent. Cowboy Space Corporation ’s team has worked at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Astranis and NASA, and is based in San Carlos, CA. If you're ready to solve complex technical challenges and help build the most important energy company in the world, we want to hear from you.

The Role

You are our first Reliability Engineer, so you are not inheriting a process: you are deciding what it is. There is a well-worn reliability playbook in this industry, developed at large primes on programs with hundreds of engineers, and most of it will make us slower without making the rocket better. Your job is to figure out which parts earn their keep here, implement those, and leave the rest on the shelf.

You own how we reason about failure across the vehicle and the engines: where the single points of failure are, which ones we accept and why, where redundancy actually buys something versus just adding parts and interfaces, what test data says about margin, and what we do about the anomaly we saw on the stand last week. You will sit with the propulsion, structures, and avionics engineers rather than in a separate assurance org.

• Decide what reliability toolkit this program runs on, write it down short enough that people follow it, and defend every inclusion and omission
• Pick analysis depth per subsystem instead of applying one standard everywhere — some interfaces deserve a full FMECA, some deserve a one-page failure walkdown, some deserve nothing
• Own the failure analyses: FMEA/FMECA, fault trees, single-point-failure identification, common-cause assessment, and the redundancy trades that follow
• Work the physics of failure, not just the statistics — fatigue, thermal cycling, cryogenic effects, contamination, wear, and the failure modes peculiar to LOX and LNG service
• Define what each test needs to prove, and get that instrumentation into the plan before the article is built
• Run failure review and corrective action fast enough that engineers use it voluntarily
• Build the lightest tooling that work:
  Python and version control, not an enterprise suite
• Teach. The leverage is not the analyses you run, it is the engineers who start thinking about failure modes before they get to you.

• 5-8 years in reliability, mission assurance,…