Radiation Metrology and Test Engineer

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Current energy and data systems rely on complex logistics and outdated infrastructure.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.

The Role

Build the hardware, automation, and measurement systems that let us understand how electronics behave under radiation. You will own reusable radiation test infrastructure, from circuit design and bench checkout through test execution and reproducible results.

Your initial focus will be a modular motherboard/daughterboard platform for heavy-ion testing of individual electronic components. You will develop the supporting instrument control, electrical characterization, event capture, and data processing needed to use that platform across different devices and campaigns.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will work with radiation effects engineers to translate test objectives into validated setups, with avionics designers to reproduce relevant operating conditions, and with test facilities to execute campaigns. Your continuing responsibility will be to extend and maintain the test capability as new components and engineering questions emerge. This role is located onsite in San Carlos, CA or Kent, WA.

Responsibilities

• Develop reusable test electronics. Design and bring up motherboards, device-specific daughterboards, bias and protection circuits, fixtures, and interfaces for component radiation testing. Document the interfaces so new devices can be tested without rebuilding the entire setup.

• Build reliable test automation. Develop software for instrument control, stimulus generation, electrical characterization, event logging, and data reduction. Make runs recoverable and preserve hardware, software, and instrument configurations alongside the measurements.

• Own measurement quality. Establish calibration and verification procedures for the electrical measurement chain. Characterize uncertainty, repeatability, noise, timing, and event-detection limits so the team can distinguish device behavior from test-system artifacts.

• Prepare and execute radiation campaigns. Develop procedures, perform readiness checks, and operate test setups for heavy-ion and other component radiation tests. Coordinate sample preparation, beam access, and facility interfaces with the relevant specialists.

• Make exposure and response data traceable. Confirm required beam and dosimetry information with facility staff, record exposure conditions and device operating states, and correlate those records with electrical measurements and observed events.

• Turn test runs into engineering evidence. Characterize devices before, during, and after exposure as required; investigate unexpected results; and deliver reproducible analysis, clear reports, and documented limitations for review with radiation effects and component engineers.

• Sustain the broader test capability. Improve related characterization benches, data-acquisition tools, fixtures, documentation, and checkout procedures. Use lessons from each campaign to reduce setup errors and make future testing easier to repeat.

Basic Qualifications

• A degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, physics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• Hands-on experience testing electronic hardware under radiation, with an understanding of single-event effects and total ionizing dose.

• Experience designing, bringing up, and debugging PCB-based test hardware, including bias circuits, component interfaces, and electrical measurements.

• Ability to develop maintainable test automation and data-analysis software in Python or a comparable language.

• Practical experience with instruments such as source measure units, oscilloscopes, power supplies, and data-acquisition systems.

• Careful measurement and documentation habits: checking calibration and setup behavior, preserving raw data, investigating anomalies, and explaining the limits of a result.

Preferred Qualifications

• Heavy-ion or proton testing at external facilities, including device preparation and beamline setup.

• High-voltage or power-semiconductor characterization, including protection and recovery during testing.

• Embedded C/C++, microcontroller or FPGA interfaces, and instrument-control libraries.

• Radiation test methods and standards, uncertainty analysis, or development of reusable test platforms.

Why This Role Is Different

• A reusable component-test platform that has been checked out with representative devices, demonstrated its measurement and event-capture behavior, and produced a traceable radiation-test dataset. Other engineers should be able to reproduce its setup, understand its limits, and extend it to the next device.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for this position is $165,000 - $190,000 annually. The actual base salary offered will depend on factors such as job-related skills, experience, qualifications, and internal equity.

• Equity in Cowboy Space Corp.

• 401(k) retirement savings plan

• Paid time off

• 10 paid holidays per calendar year

• Paid parental leave

• Relocation assistance if applicable

ITAR Requirements

• Export Control Requirement: To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about ITAR here.