Senior Radiation Effects & Resilience Engineer

About the role

Join Cowboy Space Corp as a Senior Radiation Effects & Resilience Engineer to lead the analysis and mitigation of radiation impacts on next‑generation orbital compute systems. This onsite position in San Carlos, CA (or Kent, WA) supports the company’s mission to deliver space‑based solar power and high‑performance computing from low Earth orbit.

Key responsibilities

• Lead radiation effects analysis for advanced semiconductor devices such as GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, networking ASICs, memory subsystems, and power electronics.
• Develop and evaluate mitigation techniques for single‑event upsets (SEU), single‑event transients (SET), latch‑up (SEL), total ionizing dose (TID), and displacement damage.
• Define architectural resilience strategies, including error‑correcting codes (ECC), redundancy, fault detection, recovery, and software‑defined fault‑tolerance mechanisms.
• Plan, coordinate, and execute radiation test campaigns on orbital hardware.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to integrate resilience solutions into large‑scale compute infrastructure.

Required profile

• PhD or Master’s degree in Physics, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience working on radiation effects, space hardware, or high‑reliability semiconductor systems.
• Strong systems intuition and ability to translate physics insights into practical engineering solutions.
• Proven track record of leading technical projects in aerospace, defense, or high‑performance computing environments.

Required skills

• Radiation effects analysis
• Semiconductor device expertise (GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, ASICs)
• Radiation testing and test campaign management
• Fault tolerance design (ECC, redundancy, detection & recovery)
• Mitigation techniques for SEU, SET, SEL, TID, displacement damage