Chief Engineer, Space Vehicle Autonomy

Chief Engineer, Space Vehicle Autonomy

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. As the Chief Engineer, Space Vehicle Autonomy, you will serve as the senior technical authority driving the architecture, design, and maturation of autonomous decision-making systems for our satellite platforms; systems that must not only act independently, but perceive and understand the orbital environment around them.

You will bridge traditional deterministic autonomy engineering with modern AI/ML and computer vision techniques, weaving Space Domain Awareness (SDA) directly into the autonomy architecture so our spacecraft can sense, characterize, decide, and act on their surroundings in increasingly complex and contested space environments. This role calls for a leader who can drive software and AI/ML autonomy architecture while partnering closely with GN&C, perception, and systems engineering teams to optimize the overall system design.

This is a technical leadership position — you will set the technical direction, adjudicate the hardest engineering trade-offs, and serve as the final technical authority on autonomy and SDA architecture across the program. While this role is scoped to support National Security satellite platforms, the autonomy and SDA architecture principles developed here are expected to inform future reuse across Blue Origin's broader portfolio, including civil space and deep-space missions requiring autonomous navigation (e.g., lunar/Mars optical navigation).

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Serve as the technical authority for space vehicle autonomy, setting the architecture and technical strategy for onboard autonomous decision-making across fault management, navigation, and mission execution.
• Define and evolve the autonomy architecture spanning traditional rule-based/deterministic autonomy (state machines, fault detection, isolation and response (FDIR)) and modern AI/ML and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based perception and decision-making methods.
• Provide expert technical direction on Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop implementation for autonomous spacecraft operating in Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) mission profiles.
• Integrate Space Domain Awareness (SDA) principles into onboard autonomy — enabling spacecraft to detect, track, characterize, and respond to other objects and activity within the surrounding orbital environment.
• Lead the technical strategy for perception stacks, including sensor fusion, relative navigation, space object detection/tracking, and vision-based pose estimation supporting autonomous maneuvering, inspection, and SDA missions.
• Guide the development and oversight of MLOps pipelines, including training data curation, model validation, verification, and lifecycle management for flight-qualified ML/AI models supporting autonomy and SDA functions.
• Define and own the verification strategy for autonomy and SDA functions across the full test hierarchy, including software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) demonstration campaigns, ensuring algorithms and models are rigorously matured and validated prior to onboard/flight integration.
• Chair and participate in Engineering Review Boards and Failure Review Boards, adjudicating technical gaps between as-designed, as-built, and as-tested configurations.
• Act as the final decision-maker on complex, multidisciplinary autonomy technical problems, balancing performance, safety, and mission assurance in contested and congested space environments.
• Partner with systems engineering, GN&C, flight software, mission operations, and intelligence/SDA stakeholders to ensure autonomy solutions are integrated across the full spacecraft architecture.
• Serve as a technical bridge across autonomy, perception, GN&C, and systems engineering, ensuring decision-making and navigation/estimation functions are architected as one coherent system and that requirements, interfaces, and verification stay aligned across disciplines.
• Partner with GN&C, computer vision, software, and systems engineering leads to define clean interfaces across the autonomy…