Radiation Effects Engineer

Spacecraft represent the most pressing unmet need across the entire aerospace industry. As more launch vehicles come online and the cost to orbit decreases, more companies launching payloads to space continue to emerge.

For the first time in history, this influx of payload companies combined with reduced launch costs has resulted in a massive increase in need for commercial spacecraft platforms, known as satellite buses. These buses hold the payloads of our customers and are flown on launch vehicles.

Apex manufactures these satellite buses at scale using a combination of software, vertical integration, and hardware that is designed for manufacturing. Our spacecraft enable the future of society: ranging from earth observation to communications and more.

We’d love for you to join us on our mission of providing humankind access to the galaxy beyond our planet.

As the lead Radiation Effects engineer, you will serve as a point of contact for all technical topics related to space environment qualification and design, and meet team members' needs, customer requirements, and company goals. In this unique role, you will serve as Apex’s technical authority for spacecraft electronics radiation susceptibility with the responsibility of hardening reliable space systems. This position requires deep technical expertise in radiation effects testing and analysis.

You will collaborate across design, manufacturing, systems, and mission assurance disciplines to ensure spacecraft meet reliability, availability, and life requirements. You are responsible for enforcing the Radiation Hardness Assurance for our various buses, products, and individual components. You will coordinate closely with all product designers to continually evolve, test, and maintain a radiation parts and materials library. You will also provide radiation analysis capabilities to ensure spacecraft shielding and electronics design is adequate for compliance with harsh environments ranging from LEO to GEO.

• Establish and own the radiation engineering processes and provide cross-discipline training to instill a culture of survivability awareness across the company.
• Supervise and operate radiation test equipment, including total dose sources and pulsed laser equipment.
• Provide radiation-tolerant recommendations to product designers to increase the probability of mission success through part selection, circuit design, passive/active radiation mitigations, and mission design recommendations.
• Support business development and mission integration efforts by contributing to proposals, requirements development, customer briefings, and design reviews (SRR, PDR, CDR) with radiation assessments.
• Develop cumulative (total dose, displacement damage) and single event effects models for any orbital regime using industry standard tools and best practices.
• Own the budget, schedule, plan, and execution of radiation test campaigns at external facilities (protons, heavy ions, gamma, neutron) or through third-party partners.
• Provide unit and mission level radiation analyses, including SEE rates, availability estimates, cumulative dose exposure, s and the associated artifacts for requirements verification.
• Maintain and grow the parts and materials library databases with critical piece-part and material information accessible to all designers.

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Nuclear Engineering, or related field
• 5–10 years of experience in radiation effects and/or reliability engineering for aerospace systems
• Expertise with radiation tools (e.g., AE9/AP9/SPM, CREME
  96, OMERE, SPENVIS) for environmental definition and requirements definition.
• Familiarity with industry radiation standards (e.g. MIL-STD-750, MIL-STD-883, ECSS-Q-ST-60-15C, MIL-STD-3053 and NASA testing guidelines).
• Extensive experience with budgeting, scheduling, and executing SEE, TID, and DDD test campaigns, including test evaluation hardware/kit development, and familiar with testing FPGAs and microprocessors.
• Proficiency with data analysis and modeling software (Python, MATLAB, or equivalent).
• Familiarity with circuit simulation tools (e.g., LTSpice) with…