Senior Material Science and Growth Engineer

Senior Material Science and Growth Engineer

Washington, DC

Besxar Space Industries, Inc. (Besxar) is building off-Earth foundries that use the natural ultra-high vacuum of space as a manufacturing input. Our Fabships are designed to produce trusted, ultra-high-yield semiconductor materials that are difficult or impossible to make on Earth at comparable purity and defect performance.

We are not building a science project; we are building a new industrial capability. That means real hardware, rapid iteration, disciplined execution, and a willingness to challenge assumptions from first principles as we design, fly, learn, and improve mission by mission.

Semiconductor materials and growth are the heart of Besxar’s product — the reason the company exists. This role sits at the core of Fabship development: owning the growth processes and material outcomes that define our yield, purity, and defect performance, and translating ambiguous mission and business requirements into repeatable, manufacturable growth recipes and hardware. You will help define how the materials and growth team operates as we scale, and you will be one of the earliest technical hires shaping the foundational materials science, IP, and manufacturing systems from the ground up.

You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with systems, mechanical, electrical, software, manufacturing, and test to develop and fly growth hardware on real schedules. The expectation is hands‑on leadership across recipe development, deposition and epitaxy, in‑situ and ex‑situ characterization, build, bring‑up, integration, test, failure learning, and design iteration. This is frontier R&D in service of an industrial outcome — not a research lab — so the bar is turning unknowns into processes that produce hardware mission after mission.

• Lead semiconductor materials growth and epitaxial process R&D for Besxar Fabships, including recipe development, trade studies, detailed process design, and integration strategy across deposition sources, growth chambers, vacuum systems, substrates, and supporting tooling.
• Develop and optimize advanced semiconductor material growth and epitaxial processes, owning the relationship between process parameters and material quality — crystallinity, composition, doping, defect density, thickness uniformity, and interface abruptness.
• Design and run experiments to understand material behavior, growth dynamics, and process interactions in environments where many variables are still unknown; build foundational understanding from first principles.
• Characterize semiconductor materials and growth outputs using techniques such as SEM, XRD, and spectroscopy; interpret experimental data and close the loop back into process improvements.
• Operate, maintain, and improve advanced vacuum and thin‑film deposition systems, including source preparation, chamber conditioning, leak and contamination control, and in‑situ diagnostics.
• Translate mission and system requirements into manufacturable, repeatable growth processes that balance material performance, yield, throughput, contamination sensitivity, serviceability, cost, and schedule.
• Partner with mechanical, electrical, software, and systems engineering to define growth‑hardware requirements, instrumentation, and control, and to integrate growth subsystems into Fabships.
• Build the foundational process and materials knowledge base — recipes, process windows, characterization standards, and design‑of‑experiments practices — for an entirely new manufacturing platform.
• Contribute to scaling experimental growth processes into repeatable manufacturing systems, including transfer from lab to flight hardware and definition of process control and acceptance criteria.
• Bring a strong lessons‑learned mindset: use prior process experience, build feedback, supplier issues, characterization data, and failure investigations to improve each material and process revision and avoid repeating mistakes.
• Lead or contribute to design and process reviews, root‑cause investigations, and anomaly resolution with a high bar for clear communication and sound technical judgment.
• Help define how materials and growth…