Senior Power Engineer

Vast is seeking a Senior Power Engineer to own the power system architecture and development for a new constellation-ready 15kW spacecraft bus — a product line designed to scale to hundreds of spacecraft per year.

This will be a full-time, exempt position located in our Long Beach location.

About the role:

You'll define the power system architecture for a 15kW-class spacecraft bus — topology, bus voltage, battery sizing, power electronics, and fault protection. You own the architecture decisions, the end-to-end power budget, and the power quality requirements that payload customers must meet. You'll determine what needs to be built new versus what can be reused from heritage, define requirements for any new avionics boxes, and work with the electronics lead to get them built. You'll also coordinate with the solar array and battery teams on electrical performance and any modifications needed for this mission.

Responsibilities:

• Define the power architecture — DET vs MPPT topology, bus voltage selection, battery sizing, solar array string configuration
• Define requirements for power electronics boxes — the electronics lead builds the boards, you own what they need to do and how they're tested
• Own the power budget — detailed by mode (safe, nominal, peak, eclipse), closed with margin for all payload configurations including high-power compute payloads
• Coordinate with the internal battery team — assess whether the heritage battery meets this mission's requirements and define any modifications needed
• Coordinate with the solar array team on array electrical performance — cell selection, string voltage, degradation, articulation strategy
• Own power distribution — evaluate heritage options or define new requirements as the architecture demands
• Define requirements for SADA and solar array release mechanism procurement
• Define and tailor bus power quality requirements — voltage regulation, transient response, inrush management, EMI/EMC (tailored from MIL-STD-461 or equivalent) — and work with payload customers to flow down and verify compliance
• Own fault protection and safe mode power management — undervoltage protection, load shedding, safe mode power profiles
• Support system-level power trades — how do high-power payloads affect battery sizing, solar array sizing, and eclipse performance?
• Contribute power budget and architecture trade results to the spacecraft design and simulation toolchain
• Build a power engineering team as the program scales from first build to production rate

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical discipline
• 6+ years of spacecraft power system design experience — solar array, battery, bus regulation, power distribution
• Experience with power architecture trades (DET vs MPPT, bus voltage selection)
• Power budget development and management across multiple operating modes
• Battery management system experience — charge control, cell balancing, state of charge estimation
• Understanding of solar array electrical performance — I-V curves, temperature coefficients, radiation degradation
• Experience taking a power electronics box from requirements through functional test
• Comfortable managing heritage reuse — assessing whether existing hardware meets new mission requirements

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Full lifecycle experience with spacecraft power systems — requirements, design, build, test, flight, and on-orbit operations
• Able to obtain a security clearance
• Experience with high-power spacecraft buses (5kW+ class)
• SADA (solar array drive actuator) selection and integration experience
• Power system experience across multi-satellite builds
• Familiarity with LiIon battery electrochemistry and cell-level performance modeling
• Fault protection and autonomous power management experience