Engine Engineer Long , CA

Orbital Operations is seeking an Engine Responsible Engineer to own the end-to-end development of our large liquid-oxygen/liquid-hydrogen rocket engine system.

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role for someone who has previously supported a large cryogenic engine through design, development, integrated testing, and major hot-fire campaigns. You will serve as the directly responsible engineer for the engine and guide the program from its current architecture through development, qualification, and flight.

Your ownership will extend across the complete engine system, including tubing and plumbing, P&IDs, turbo machinery, combustion devices, valves, instrumentation, controls interfaces, test operations, data review, and anomaly resolution. You will define the engine development roadmap, identify the most important risks, and determine how analysis and testing should be used to retire them.

The work will vary significantly from day to day. You may spend one day reviewing engine-system performance, another routing flight tubing or defining a test sequence, and the next sitting on console for a hot-fire test. As the vehicle program progresses, you will also have the opportunity to define stage-test objectives, develop flight concepts of operations, and support launch operations from console.

This position requires deep technical experience, but also the curiosity to continually learn about the vehicle, ground systems, avionics, structures, and other systems that interface with the engine. You should be a self-starter who can create direction where it does not yet exist, lead collaborative projects to completion, and maintain technical rigor while moving on an ambitious schedule.

• Serve as the Responsible Engineer and primary technical owner for the main engine from development through qualification and flight.
• Establish and continuously refine the engine development strategy, technical priorities, test progression, and criteria for advancing between program phases.
• Maintain a system-level understanding of the complete engine, including combustion devices, turbo machinery, valves, ignition, tubing, instrumentation, controls, and thermal management.
• Identify the engine program’s most important technical risks and develop focused analysis and test plans to retire them.
• Make technical trades across performance, mass, reliability, schedule, cost, manufacturability, operability, and test risk.
• Provide clear technical direction to the engineers, technicians, suppliers, and partner teams contributing to the engine.
• Communicate engine status, risks, test results, decisions, and resource needs to company leadership.
• Create and own projects that improve the team’s technical capability, development speed, and collective efficiency.

• Own engine-level fluid schematics, P&IDs, pressure budgets, operating states, and interface documentation.
• Own the design and integration of engine tubing and plumbing systems.
• Establish tubing requirements for sizing, routing, pressure drop, thermal contraction, flexibility, vibration, supports, joints, cleanliness, inspectability, manufacturability, assembly, and serviceability.
• Define and maintain engine interfaces with propellant tanks, vehicle feed systems, pressurization systems, ground-support equipment, and test infrastructure.
• Review fluid-system analyses involving pressure loss, flow distribution, chilldown, cavitation margin, two-phase behavior, thermal conditioning, and transient response.
• Ensure the physical engine configuration accurately reflects the released P&IDs, analyses, procedures, and test configuration.

• Apply engineering fundamentals in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, combustion, and structural mechanics to solve engine-development problems.
• Define engine operating envelopes, performance requirements, startup and shutdown sequences, conditioning procedures, redlines, and abort criteria.
• Lead or review engine-system analyses, simulations, and trade studies.
• Support subsystem troubleshooting and investigations involving combustion…