Embedded Automation Architect — Factory Automation Group

Application close date:

Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the requisition is closed.

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. Join our team of problem solvers as we add new chapters to the history of spaceflight!

This role is part of Blue Origin Operations, which is comprised of Integrated Supply Chain, Test Operations, Safety, Quality, and Mission Assurance. This includes Manufacturing and Supply Chain support across all Blue Origin facilities.

The Embedded Automation Architect sits within a specific Blue Origin business unit (New Glenn, Engines, Lunar, In-Space Systems, or a production site) while reporting into the central Factory Automation Group. You are the single point of automation strategy for that business unit: you build its complete multi-year automation roadmap against Blue's shared automation backbone, decide what to automate and in what order, resolve make-versus-buy, and shepherd projects from concept through the central Factory Automation build teams to production.

This is an architect and technical-leadership role, not a single-cell build role — you will set the technical direction that hands-on controls and mechanical engineers then execute, and you will be measured on the roadmap you originate and the recurring cost your automation removes, not on machines you personally wire. You set the technical direction — increasingly AI-enabled — for how a business unit's work gets automated, from machine-generated programming through in-process ML quality to the reasoning layers behind automated part buyoff, and you work AI-natively yourself, using and where useful building the tools that make a small automation team move faster.

You bring deep, credible controls and robotics expertise — enough to earn the trust of the build engineers and to review their work — and you apply it at the level of a program's whole automation footprint rather than one machine at a time. Once a business unit's roadmap is executing, you redeploy to architect the next.

Key Responsibilities
· Own and continuously maintain the automation roadmap for your assigned business unit, built against Blue's shared automation standards, template library, and digital thread — not a per-site fork.
· Prioritize automation investment using category economics: identify where recurring labor and cost are trapped (e.g. high finished-part-to-material cost ratios on machined hardware), and rank candidates by savings potential against capital and schedule.
· Lead make-versus-buy decisions for automation systems, applying Blue's build-versus-integrator economics — defending an internal-build option where it lowers capital intensity and captures integrator margin.
· Enforce design-for-automation upstream: partner with the business unit's design and engineering teams to freeze designs, collapse part count, and reduce fasteners before automation capital is committed.
· Architect AI-enabled automation where it earns its place: model-driven machine-generated programming (auto-CAM, offline robot programming), ML-based in-process inspection, and agentic planning — governed by an honest, evidence-based gate that keeps a human signature on safety- and fracture-critical characteristics and lets automated buyoff shrink that gate only as capability data accumulates.
· Work AI-natively in your own engineering — using AI assistants for code generation, documentation, and design acceleration — and identify or build reusable automation tools that the wider Factory Automation group can adopt, rather than solving the same problem…