Development Engineer, Solid Rocket Motors

About the Team

The Propulsion Team designs, builds, and flies the solid rocket motors that power our interceptor. We own the chemistry, the motor and grain design, the ground test campaigns, and the range operations.

About the Role

We are looking for a development engineer who will own the design of our solid rocket motors. That covers motor architecture, grain design, internal ballistics, performance prediction, igniter design, case and nozzle integration, and the work of tying predicted, ground-tested, and flight-test motor behavior together so the model keeps getting better after every fire. You will report to the Head of Propulsion.

This is a hands-on role for someone sharp and practical who is comfortable owning a discipline without an expert above them. When a decision needs to be made, bring real design options and the analysis behind them, then go execute.

Every design decision is also a unit-cost decision, and we expect you to design accordingly.

What You'll Do

• Make the architecture calls for both motor programs.
• Own grain design and internal ballistics.
• Build motor performance models for total impulse, peak and average thrust, specific impulse, and throat erosion.
• Design the dual-pulse architecture.
• Design the head-end igniters.
• Own the case and nozzle integration. The structural design of the case may sit with the vehicle engineering team; coordinate with them on it.
• Run ground test campaigns. Reduce the data so the ballistic model gets updated after every fire.
• Write the burn-to-flight closure report for every motor we put in the air.
• Support customer engagements and SBIR pursuits with quick concept work on additional motor sizes, especially when the revenue is real.

Skills We're Hiring For

• B.S. in Aerospace, Mechanical, or Chemical Engineering, Physics, or related field.
• 5+ years of hands-on solid rocket motor development. At least one motor program where you carried it from grain concept through ground test, ideally with flight history too.
• Fluency with composite-propellant solid motor design.
• Working fluency with at least one internal-ballistic code and one thermochemistry code. You should also be able to validate or extend those tools from first principles when they fall short.
• Comfortable in modern CAD. We use NX, but the package itself is not the bar.
• Hands-on ground test experience: instrumentation planning, test card writing, post-test data reduction.
• Able to defend every major performance prediction with first-principles analysis.
• A real track record of meeting motor performance without reaching for exotic chemistry or hard-to-source materials. No high-energy oxidizers, no nano-aluminum, no exotic binders.
• AI-native working style: daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or similar) for ballistic-code scripting, performance prediction, and post-test data reduction.

Bonus Points For

• Direct dual-pulse motor design or dual-thrust grain experience (pulse-separation devices, dividers, multi-composition grains).
• Tactical, munition, or missile-class motor design experience.
• Familiarity with insensitive munitions (IM) protocols.
• Head-end igniter design experience.
• Hands-on grain casting or hands-on tooling design, so you know what you are asking of the manufacturing engineer when you change geometry.
• Custom internal-ballistic code authorship.
• Out-of-domain background that gives you practical, first-principles intuition (automotive, motorsports, EVTOL, robotics, hobbyist high-power rocketry). We actively want people who can solve solid motor problems without dragging legacy-prime habits with them.