Avionics & Electrical Power Engineer

Parallax Space is building critical mission infrastructure to enable rapid, reliable, and scalable access to space. We partner with commercial, civil, and national security customers to deliver high-performance satellite components, integrated payload systems, and mission capabilities that close critical gaps in modern space architecture.

Our model combines advanced engineering, mission execution, and scalable manufacturing to deliver high-TRL products and flight-ready systems at speed.

We are building the infrastructure backbone for the next generation of space systems.

Position Overview

Parallax Space is seeking a Avionics & Electrical Power Engineer to design, develop, integrate, and qualify electrical power systems for spacecraft, payloads, and mission hardware. This is a mid-to-senior-level role with direct ownership of power architecture, power distribution, and battery design across the full product lifecycle.

The engineer will translate mission and product requirements into reliable, manufacturable electrical power systems encompassing generation, energy storage, regulation, conversion, protection, switching, and distribution. The role will own power budgets and operating profiles; size batteries and power-distribution hardware; develop and review schematics, interfaces, and analyses; and support hardware through procurement, build, integration, environmental test, delivery, and mission operations.

The successful candidate will combine strong spacecraft power-system fundamentals with practical hardware judgment. This individual must be comfortable moving between system-level trades and detailed design, working directly with multidisciplinary engineering teams and suppliers, troubleshooting integrated hardware, and making timely decisions in a fast-paced development environment.

The position may be filled at the mid-level or senior level based on the candidate’s experience, technical depth, and demonstrated scope of ownership.

Key Responsibilities

Electrical Power System Architecture

• Develop end-to-end electrical power system architectures for spacecraft, payloads, and mission hardware
• Translate mission requirements and operational concepts into power-generation, storage, conversion, distribution, and protection requirements
• Create and maintain power budgets, energy balances, peak-load assessments, mode-based load profiles, efficiency estimates, and system margins
• Size solar-array interfaces, batteries, power converters, regulators, distribution channels, harnesses, protection devices, and related hardware
• Perform architecture trades addressing regulated and unregulated buses, voltage selection, redundancy, fault tolerance, scalability, recurring cost, and mission life
• Define and control electrical interfaces, grounding and bonding approaches, power-quality requirements, and compatibility across subsystems
• Support system design reviews and clearly communicate architecture decisions, margins, assumptions, and technical risks

Power Distribution & Conversion

• Design and develop power distribution units, power conditioning and distribution units, electronic power systems, and related spacecraft power electronics
• Define load-switching, current-limiting, inrush-control, overvoltage, under voltage, short-circuit, reverse-polarity, and fault-containment strategies
• Develop or evaluate DC-DC converters, point-of-load regulation, battery charge and discharge electronics, bus regulation, and power switching circuits
• Establish channel allocation, load shedding, safe-state behavior, redundancy, telemetry, command, and fault-response requirements
• Create and review schematics, electrical block diagrams, interface-control documents, wiring diagrams, component selections, and printed circuit board layouts
• Evaluate power integrity, conducted emissions and susceptibility, grounding, isolation, transient response, ripple, stability, efficiency, and thermal performance
• Partner with avionics, flight software, systems, and mission operations teams to implement power control, monitoring, autonomy, and fault management

Battery & Energy Storage Design

• Lead battery architecture, cell selection, pack sizing, configuration, and performance assessment for spacecraft and payload applications
• Develop battery requirements addressing energy, power, voltage, depth of discharge, cycle life, calendar life, radiation, temperature, storage, and mission duration
• Design or oversee cell balancing, state-of-charge monitoring, charge control, protection, fusing, isolation, telemetry, and battery management functions
• Perform charge and discharge modeling, capacity and degradation analysis, duty-cycle assessment, fault analysis, and operating-margin evaluation
• Coordinate battery electrical, thermal, mechanical, safety, handling, shipping, storage, and integration requirements across the product team
• Evaluate cells, modules, battery assemblies, and suppliers using test data, heritage, qualification status, manufacturability, availability, and mission risk
• Develop battery…