Electromechanical Packaging Engineer III - Electro-Optical Components

The Role

You will own ruggedized electro-optical enclosures, assemblies, and fiber-optic integration for Blue Origin's optical communications hardware aboard Blue Ring spacecraft. Space is unforgiving: extreme temperatures, violent vibration and shock, radiation, and vacuum. The electronics and photonics you design must survive all of it.

This is a senior technical role in Blue National Security, supporting classified programs. You'll set design standards, analysis methods, and process baselines for electro-optical packaging across modem processing and photonics units, electro-optic assemblies, transceiver hardware, and optical amplifier assemblies.

What You'll Own

• Complex packaging assemblies including enclosures, chassis, card-cage and stacked-unit architectures, mounting systems, and fiber junction housings from requirements through production support
• Mechanical and thermal design of modem processing and photonics units, integrating high-speed digital boards, photonics boards, electro-optic daughter cards, and power conversion slices into flight-qualifiable, mass- and volume-efficient packages
• Mechanical thermal design with thermal engineering: heat rejection paths, mounting materials, heater placement, thermal isolation, and control of tunable lasers, modulators, and TEC-cooled devices
• Fiber optic tray design and all internal fiber management: layout, routing, bend-radius control, strain relief, splice retention, and connector selection. Define splicing and workmanship processes and specify equipment to execute them
• Collaboration with electrical engineers and PCB designers on ECAD/MCAD co-design, board outline, component floor planning, heat-source placement, connector location, and component selection
• Thermal, structural, vibration, shock, and fatigue analyses. Own tolerance stack-ups and thermo-elastic stability budgets protecting optical interfaces across environments
• Mechanical, thermal, environmental, EMC, mass, and envelope requirements. Decompose host requirements into verifiable requirements, maintain traceability, and report mass properties
• Mechanical and thermal ICDs, GD&T per ASME Y14.5, and space-optics risk management including contamination control, outgassing, hermeticity, and radiation-induced fiber attenuation
• Design for production: DFM/DFA, fiber and optical assembly processes, and partnership with fabrication and assembly suppliers on producibility
• Test and integration support including fixtures and optical loopback setups, and environmental test campaigns from planning through anomaly closeout
• Mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, and building team capability in electro-optical packaging

What You Bring

• B.S. in Mechanical, Aerospace, Optical, Photonics Engineering, or related discipline, plus 3 to 5+ years designing electromechanical or electro-optical assemblies, electronics or photonics packaging, or comparable high-reliability hardware, with track record of owning designs from requirements through production
• Hands-on experience packaging electro-optical hardware: coherent or high-speed optical modems, transceivers, optical amplifier assemblies, photonic devices, lasers or detectors, or fiber-optic assemblies, including thermal, optical-interface, and contamination challenges
• Demonstrated experience designing fiber management inside constrained enclosures: tray layout, routing, bend-radius and strain-relief strategy, splice retention, and connector selection. Thermal management of temperature-sensitive photonics, including TEC integration and thermal isolation
• Experience integrating PCBAs, connectors, and cable or fiber interfaces into mechanical assemblies with close collaboration with electrical engineers and PCB designers on dense, high-reliability boards. Experience specifying mechanical and installation requirements for electrical harnesses
• Knowledge of ruggedized electronics and photonics design: thermal management, structural protection, vibration and shock survival, vacuum compatibility, and EMI/EMC shielding. Experience conducting or directing supporting analyses
• Ability to define and hold mechanical and thermal interfaces bidirectionally: specifying what your hardware requires from the host vehicle, and negotiating with engineers who own adjacent optical, structural, and payload hardware
• Strong 3D CAD skills (Creo/Pro-E a plus) and solid command of GD&T, tolerance stack-ups, and ASME Y14.5 drawing practice
• Eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance
• Comfort in fast-moving programs with evolving requirements and open trades: judgment to make defensible decisions before every input is final, and communication skills to make technical risk clear

Bonus Qualifications

• Active U.S. government security clearance and/or M.S. in relevant discipline
• Experience with optical communications hardware: coherent or IM-DD transceivers, silicon photonics, optical modems, optical amplifiers, or pluggable form factors. Experience building modems, transceivers, or optical terminal electronics to standards such as SIS-002, OpenZR+, SDA optical communications terminal standards, or CCSDS optical standards
• Working knowledge of laser communications terminal architecture and coherent link building blocks: integrated coherent receivers, modulators, tunable sources, and amplifiers, and mechanical and thermal demands of each
• Experience developing hosted payloads or line-replaceable units against spacecraft bus interface specifications. Familiarity with spacecraft environmental specifications and qualification tailoring such as NASA GEVS and SMC-S-016
• Experience maturing prototypes into producible, qualifiable flight products, including reconstructing design documentation for hardware you didn't originally design
• Fiber-optic depth: splicing, connector and termini selection (MIL-PRF-29504, ARINC 801), cleaning and inspection practice (IPC-8497-1), link loss budgeting, and familiarity with IPC-A-620 and J-STD-001. Experience with photonic and semiconductor assembly processes such as die attach, wire bond, flip chip, hermetic sealing, and fiber alignment
• Analysis depth in electronics thermal, structural, vibration, shock, or fatigue work, including solder-fatigue methods such as Steinberg or Engelmaier and FEA/thermal simulation in ANSYS or FloTHERM. Hands-on familiarity with ECAD tools such as Altium or Mentor xPedition and PLM tools such as Windchill
• Familiarity with qualification and reliability standards such as Telcordia GR-468-CORE and GR-1221, MIL-STD-883, MIL-STD-1678, or JEDEC. Experience with radiation-tolerant part selection and contamination control for space optics, including outgassing screening per ASTM E595
• Background in spacecraft, national-security space, human spaceflight, launch vehicle, or other extreme-environment hardware, ideally on long-duration or high-radiation missions beyond LEO. Track record of mentoring engineers and building new design or analysis capability on a team

Compensation

Base pay range for Colorado applicants: $119,814.00 - $167,738.55. Other site ranges may differ.

Employment

Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted as a refugee or granted asylum.

This role requires eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance. An existing clearance is preferred but not required; Blue Origin will sponsor the right candidate.

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