Ordnance Engineer at Cowboy Space Corp. in Washington, DC

Job description

Ordnance Engineer | Job Description About Cowboy Space Corporation Mission Cowboy Space Corporation is solving the global energy crisis by building the infrastructure for abundant, resilient space-based solar energy. We are tackling one of humanity’s most complex engineering challenges with a world-class team dedicated to delivering a revolutionary power platform. Cowboy Space Corporation is transforming how civilization powers, computes and connects - from orbit to Earth. Background Cowboy Space Corporation is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our modular, scalable satellites collect sunlight in Low Earth Orbit to enable multiple integrated applications: transmitting energy via infrared lasers (space-to-earth and space-to-space), powering on-orbit high-performance computing clusters (GPU/TPU), and providing secure, high bandwidth optical data transport. Current energy and data systems rely on complex logistics and outdated infrastructure. Cowboy Space Corporation overcomes these challenges by enabling direct, on-demand, secure, and scalable energy distribution and data processing from space. This will revolutionize how we operate in orbit and on Earth, supporting the rapidly expanding space industrial base, ISAM (In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing) operations, remote regions, and military bases. Baiju Bhatt founded Cowboy Space Corporation in 2024. Inspired by his father’s work with NASA Langley Research Center, Baiju earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics at Stanford before co-founding Robinhood, now a public company that has helped over 20 million Americans access the financial system. Cowboy Space Corporation has raised ~$365 million from Index Ventures, Interlagos, Construct Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and others. This is an ambitious mission that demands extraordinary talent. Cowboy Space Corporation’s team has worked at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Astranis and NASA, and is based in San Carlos, CA. If you're ready to solve complex technical challenges and help build the most important energy company in the world, we want to hear from you. About the Role You own every energetic device on the vehicle. Pyro-valves and pyro-actuated mechanisms, and the initiators, safe-and-arm devices, and detonating trains that fire all of them. You also own the physical reality of energetics on the ground: how we buy them, store them, ship them, handle them, and who is allowed to touch them. This is a first-hire role for the discipline. There is no ordnance group, no qualified pyro train to inherit, and no explosives site plan. Early on you are running trades, calling vendors, and writing specifications. Later you are qualifying hardware, then standing on the pad watching someone install a live initiator against a procedure you wrote and signed. You will work alongside our Flight Safety System Architect and our Range Safety Lead. Flight Safety owns the AFTS unit, its reliability case, and the firing circuit. You own the safe-and-arm device and everything downstream of it, all non-safety-critical ordnance on the vehicle, and everything to do with energetics on the ground. What You’ll Do • Define the ordnance architecture for the vehicle: any pyro-actuated valve or mechanism • Select, specify, and qualify the hardware: initiators and detonators, safe-and-arm and electronic safe-and-arm devices, through-bulkhead initiators, detonating cord and transfer lines, shaped charge, frangible joints, separation nuts, and pin pullers • Own the energetics side of the initiation chain: no-fire and all-fire current, firing margin, function time and margin, and the inadvertent-initiation analysis on your side of the connector • Own the environmental and susceptibility case: HERO and RF susceptibility per MIL-STD-464, ESD, bonding and grounding, thermal, vibration, and shock • Run the qualification campaigns: component-level, subsystem-level,