You are our first Reliability Engineer, so you are not inheriting a process: you are deciding what it is. There is a well-worn reliability playbook in this industry, developed at large primes on programs with hundreds of engineers, and most of it will make us slower without making the rocket better. Your job is to figure out which parts earn their keep here, implement those, and leave the rest on the shelf. You own how we reason about failure across the vehicle and the engines: where the single points of failure are, which ones we accept and why, where redundancy actually buys something versus just adding parts and interfaces, what test data says about margin, and what we do about the anomaly we saw on the stand last week. You will sit with the propulsion, structures, and avionics engineers rather than in a separate assurance org.
🏢 About Cowboy Space Corporation
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.
🎯 The Role
You are our first Reliability Engineer, so you are not inheriting a process: you are deciding what it is. There is a well-worn reliability playbook in this industry, developed at large primes on programs with hundreds of engineers, and most of it will make us slower without making the rocket better. Your job is to figure out which parts earn their keep here, implement those, and leave the rest on the shelf. You own how we reason about failure across the vehicle and the engines: where the single points of failure are, which ones we accept and why, where redundancy actually buys something versus just adding parts and interfaces, what test data says about margin, and what we do about the anomaly we saw on the stand last week. You will sit with the propulsion, structures, and avionics engineers rather than in a separate assurance org.
✅ Key Responsibilities
Decide what reliability toolkit this program runs on, write it down short enough that people follow it, and defend every inclusion and omission
Pick analysis depth per subsystem instead of applying one standard everywhere — some interfaces deserve a full FMECA, some deserve a one-page failure walkdown, some deserve nothing
Own the failure analyses: FMEA/FMECA, fault trees, single-point-failure identification, common-cause assessment, and the redundancy trades that follow
Work the physics of failure, not just the statistics — fatigue, thermal cycling, cryogenic effects, contamination, wear, and the failure modes peculiar to LOX and LNG service
Define what each test needs to prove, and get that instrumentation into the plan before the article is built
Run failure review and corrective action fast enough that engineers use it voluntarily
Build the lightest tooling that work: Python and version control, not an enterprise suite
Teach. The leverage is not the analyses you run, it is the engineers who start thinking about failure modes before they get to you.
📌 Required Qualifications
5-8 years in reliability, mission assurance, or systems engineering with real reliability ownership, on hardware where failure had consequences
Command of the core methods: FMECA, fault tree analysis, common-cause analysis, allocation, Weibull and life-data analysis
The judgment to right-size. You have seen reliability process applied where it did not belong, and you have opinions about the alternative
Physics-of-failure instinct: you want to know why the part broke, not just how often parts like it break
Hands-on test experience. You have stood next to hardware, watched it misbehave, and worked the anomaly to root cause
Python sufficient to run Monte Carlos, fit life data, and build tools your teammates use without your help
Statistical honesty about small samples. When a number rests on four data points and an assumed distribution, you say so instead of quoting three significant figures
Willingness to make a call on incomplete information, state the assumptions, and revise
Bachelor's degree in engineering, or similar.
⭐ Desirable Experience
Launch vehicle or liquid rocket engine experience, especially cryogenic
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