Manufacturing 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 manufacturing engineer who will own how every solid rocket motor we ship actually gets built. That covers process design, tooling and fixtures, work instructions, inspection and NDE, the energetics line layout, and the path from R&D builds to production. You will report to the Head of Propulsion.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who can design a safe, efficient energetics production line from a clean sheet and then run it day to day in the early phase. When a decision needs to be made, bring real process options, tooling concepts, and the cost analysis to back them up, then move quickly.

LEAN is not a buzzword here. Every step we add to the build today we pay for sixty times over at qualification and again at production. The line you design has to be safe first, lean second, and capable of holding production cadence without redesign.

What You'll Do

• Capture the current 6-inch build process (already flying motors) into travelers, work instructions, and control plans.
• Lay out the Mojave build line. Safety first, throughput second.
• Design and procure the tooling and fixtures for both motor sizes.
• Build the inspection plan. Perform NDE on early articles; transition routine NDE to an external Level III provider as build rate scales.
• Run the energetic-materials build line: handle the propellant ingredient set, the energetic and hazardous precursor chemistry, and the mix-and-cure operations safely day to day. The Energetic Materials Engineer owns formulation and characterization; you own the line that builds with it. The safety culture on the line is yours to set and defend.
• Build and own the technical side of the motor-hardware supplier base. The Head of Supply Chain owns commercial terms. Feed DFM lessons back into the development engineer's design package.

Skills We're Hiring For

• B.S. in Mechanical, Manufacturing, Chemical, or Aerospace Engineering.
• 5+ years hands-on manufacturing engineering on solid rocket motors or analogous hazardous-process manufacturing.
• Hands-on LEAN, 5S, and value-stream mapping with cost or throughput outcomes you can defend with numbers.
• Hands-on inspection and NDE experience.
• Hands-on safety record working with energetic and hazardous materials.
• Track record of taking a hand-built first article to a repeatable production article without losing performance margin.
• AI-native working style: daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or similar) for traveler authoring, process-data analysis, and supplier-comparison work.

Bonus Points For

• Direct solids build-floor experience.
• Stood up a remote or rural test and build site.
• Compliance experience for energetic operations (ATF, EPA, OSHA PSM, local AHJ).
• Volume transition: moved a tactical motor from prototype to production rate.
• Familiarity with insensitive munitions (IM) protocols.
• Out-of-domain background that gives you practical, first-principles intuition (automotive, motorsports, robotics, hobbyist high-power rocketry). We actively want people who can solve solid motor manufacturing problems without dragging legacy-prime habits with them.