Avionics Design Lead

Avionics Design Lead

Houston, TX

About Intuitive Machines:

Intuitive Machines is an innovative and cutting-edge space company making cislunar space accessible to both public and private customers. Our mission is to further science and exploration, communications, and economic progress from the Earth to the Moon and beyond. With multiple NASA lunar missions in development and additional private missions on our manifest, we pride ourselves in supporting NASA, our customers, and the nation in paving the way to return humans to the surface of the Moon. Our world-class team includes experts in all aspects of spacecraft subsystems design, development, and test, on-orbit operations, and safety.

About the Position:

We are seeking an experienced Avionics Design Lead to manage our high-performing team through the full hardware lifecycle. In this role, you will drive the design, manufacturing, assembly, and testing of critical flight hardware in a fast-paced environment. The primary focus of this position is overseeing the production of flight/test wire harnessing, printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), avionics box builds, and the final avionics integration onto our flight vehicles.

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design, development, integration, test, and qualification of avionics systems.
• Provide technical direction across avionics hardware, firmware, electrical systems, and mechanical interfaces.
• Lead and participate in engineering design reviews, including architecture, preliminary design, critical design, interface, manufacturing, test, and readiness reviews.
• Review and approve engineering designs, drawings, schematics, PCB layouts, software architectures, test plans, and technical documentation.
• Identify technical risks, drive resolution of complex engineering issues, and make sound engineering tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, cost, schedule, and manufacturability.
• Establish and maintain appropriate engineering standards, requirements, interfaces, verification methods, and configuration controls.

People Leadership & Development

• Directly manage and develop a team of avionics engineers.
• Set clear expectations, establish individual and team goals, and provide regular feedback and performance coaching.
• Recruit, onboard, train, and develop avionics engineering talent as the organization grows.
• Mentor engineers in technical development, engineering judgment, design practices, and problem-solving.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Build team capabilities and staffing plans aligned with program and company needs.

Process & Continuous Improvement

• Create, implement, and continuously improve engineering processes, procedures, standards, and SOPs for avionics development and integration.
• Establish repeatable processes for design reviews, requirements management, configuration management, hardware/software releases, testing, troubleshooting, and documentation.
• Identify process gaps and implement improvements that increase engineering velocity, quality, reliability, and scalability.

Program & Schedule Execution

• Oversee and maintain avionics development schedules, milestones, and deliverables.
• Coordinate engineering priorities and resources across multiple projects and development efforts.
• Track progress, identify schedule risks and dependencies, and proactively drive mitigation plans.
• Partner closely with program management, manufacturing, test, supply chain, quality, and other engineering disciplines to ensure on-time delivery.
• Communicate technical status, risks, decisions, and resource needs to engineering and company leadership.

Integration, Test & Flight Readiness

• Oversee avionics integration, bring-up, troubleshooting, verification, validation, and qualification activities.
• Support root-cause investigations and corrective actions for hardware and software failures.
• Support system-level integration and test campaigns, launch operations, and flight readiness activities as required.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Computer, Aerospace, Mechanical Engineering or a related technical discipline.
• 15+ years of relevant engineering experience, with significant experience in avionics, aerospace, spacecraft, launch vehicles, or another highly integrated hardware/software environment.
• 10+ years of direct supervisory experience leading engineers.
• Demonstrated experience leading multidisciplinary engineering efforts.
• Experience managing, mentoring, or technically leading engineers.
• Strong understanding of avionics hardware, firmware, and mechanical systems.
• Experience developing engineering processes, procedures, standards, or SOPs.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience developing avionics for spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, or other flight-critical systems.
• Experience with flight computers, power systems, telemetry, communications, sensors, data acquisition, command and control, or embedded systems.
• Experience with PCB design, electrical schematics, harnessing, wiring, and avionics integration.
• Familiarity with firmware development, real-time systems, and software/hardware interfaces.
• Experience with mechanical design reviews and electromechanical integration.
• Experience with environmental qualification, vibration, thermal, EMC/EMI, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Experience with requirements management, configuration management, and verification/validation.
• Experience taking hardware from concept through design, manufacturing, integration, test, and flight.
• Experience working at a rapidly growing aerospace or space technology company.

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