Senior Spacecraft Systems Engineer, Amazon Leo
Amazon · Redmond, Washington, USA ·
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Category
- Software engineering
Amazon Leo is Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite network. Our mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet connectivity to customers beyond the reach of existing networks. From individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies, Amazon Leo serves people and organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.
Amazon Leo’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) and Propulsion team designs, tests, and flies the systems that point, maneuver, and safely deorbit every satellite in the fleet. In this role you will own system-level engineering across those functions, covering electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics, for multiple satellite configurations at once. The work reaches past one subsystem: you will set the requirements and budgets that bound each function, define how they interface with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, and carry those decisions through verification, launch, and on-orbit operation. Satellites built to earlier configurations are flying today while later ones are in design, so you will reason about both at the same time and keep decisions consistent between them. These systems are interdisciplinary by construction: thruster physics, control algorithms, flight software, and ground operations are coupled tightly enough that the hardest problems sit at the seams between disciplines rather than inside any one of them.
Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Key job responsibilities
- Own the requirements and the configuration-controlled technical baseline for electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics: derive requirements from mission and spacecraft needs, manage flow-down and traceability to subsystems, and adjudicate changes to the baseline as satellite configurations evolve
- Own the interdisciplinary analysis that resolves allocations across disciplines: build and maintain the system budgets and margins (mass, power, propellant, total impulse, pointing, on-orbit lifetime), and drive the cross-functional trade studies that weigh design and operational options against them
- Define and maintain the interfaces these functions hold with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, including interface control documents (ICDs) and command and telemetry definitions
- Establish the verification and test strategy across hardware and software, from ground test and hardware-in-the-loop through on-orbit evidence, and lead fault management work including failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR)
- Define the metrics and technical performance measures for these systems, use them to drive design, test, and operational decisions, and drive the system through its design and readiness reviews
A day in the life
You sit with the engineers who design, test, and operate this hardware rather than at a distance from them, on a Redmond campus where the thermal vacuum chambers and avionics benches are a walk or a short ride away. Telemetry from satellites already in orbit arrives daily, and the questions it raises land next to questions about hardware that has not been built yet, so your attention moves between the fleet that is flying and the configuration that follows it. Collaborators include propulsion and attitude control designers, flight software, flight dynamics, power, thermal, mechanical, avionics, test, manufacturing, and the flight operations engineers who run the fleet, along with supplier partners. The cadence follows production and launch, which means decisions get made on real schedules and you see the result of yours fly. The configurations you work across sit at different life cycle phases at the same time, so one conversation can be about a flight anomaly and the next about a design that is still on paper.
About the team
The GNC and Propulsion team owns how every Amazon Leo satellite points itself, changes its orbit, avoids other objects, and leaves orbit at end of life. We build our own propulsion and attitude control systems rather than buying them, we operate them across a growing fleet, and we feed what we learn in orbit back into the next configuration. Over the coming years the team scales these systems to a larger fleet across more vehicle configurations while raising how much of the work is automated and data-driven.
Amazon Leo’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) and Propulsion team designs, tests, and flies the systems that point, maneuver, and safely deorbit every satellite in the fleet. In this role you will own system-level engineering across those functions, covering electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics, for multiple satellite configurations at once. The work reaches past one subsystem: you will set the requirements and budgets that bound each function, define how they interface with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, and carry those decisions through verification, launch, and on-orbit operation. Satellites built to earlier configurations are flying today while later ones are in design, so you will reason about both at the same time and keep decisions consistent between them. These systems are interdisciplinary by construction: thruster physics, control algorithms, flight software, and ground operations are coupled tightly enough that the hardest problems sit at the seams between disciplines rather than inside any one of them.
Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Key job responsibilities
- Own the requirements and the configuration-controlled technical baseline for electric propulsion, attitude determination and control, and flight dynamics: derive requirements from mission and spacecraft needs, manage flow-down and traceability to subsystems, and adjudicate changes to the baseline as satellite configurations evolve
- Own the interdisciplinary analysis that resolves allocations across disciplines: build and maintain the system budgets and margins (mass, power, propellant, total impulse, pointing, on-orbit lifetime), and drive the cross-functional trade studies that weigh design and operational options against them
- Define and maintain the interfaces these functions hold with flight software, power, thermal, mechanical, and avionics, including interface control documents (ICDs) and command and telemetry definitions
- Establish the verification and test strategy across hardware and software, from ground test and hardware-in-the-loop through on-orbit evidence, and lead fault management work including failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR)
- Define the metrics and technical performance measures for these systems, use them to drive design, test, and operational decisions, and drive the system through its design and readiness reviews
A day in the life
You sit with the engineers who design, test, and operate this hardware rather than at a distance from them, on a Redmond campus where the thermal vacuum chambers and avionics benches are a walk or a short ride away. Telemetry from satellites already in orbit arrives daily, and the questions it raises land next to questions about hardware that has not been built yet, so your attention moves between the fleet that is flying and the configuration that follows it. Collaborators include propulsion and attitude control designers, flight software, flight dynamics, power, thermal, mechanical, avionics, test, manufacturing, and the flight operations engineers who run the fleet, along with supplier partners. The cadence follows production and launch, which means decisions get made on real schedules and you see the result of yours fly. The configurations you work across sit at different life cycle phases at the same time, so one conversation can be about a flight anomaly and the next about a design that is still on paper.
About the team
The GNC and Propulsion team owns how every Amazon Leo satellite points itself, changes its orbit, avoids other objects, and leaves orbit at end of life. We build our own propulsion and attitude control systems rather than buying them, we operate them across a growing fleet, and we feed what we learn in orbit back into the next configuration. Over the coming years the team scales these systems to a larger fleet across more vehicle configurations while raising how much of the work is automated and data-driven.