Senior Automation and Controls Engineer
Vardaspace · El Segundo, California, United States
About this role
**About Varda** Low Earth orbit is open for business. Varda is accelerating the development of commercial space infrastructure—from in-orbit pharmaceutical processing to reliable and economical reentry capsules. Varda’s W-Series vehicles are built, designed, and operated in-house, including pharmaceutical processing payloads, capsules, C-PICA heat shields, and satellite buses. **About This Role** The **Senior Automation and Controls Engineer** builds bespoke test infrastructure that qualifies spaceflight hardware for orbit. You’ll design, build, and own sophisticated ground support equipment (GSE) and test systems—such as propulsion test stands, environmental qualification chambers, and spacecraft-level integration testing. Our stack is modern, including a custom PLC framework and Beckhoff EtherCAT tooling built in-house. You’ll have meaningful impact on architecture decisions and the opportunity to define standards that last beyond any single program. **Responsibilities** - Design, build, and maintain test systems and ground support equipment (GSE) for flight hardware qualification and manufacturing operations. - Integrate with external hardware including thermal vacuum chambers, ovens, chillers, pressure systems, data acquisition hardware, and precision instrumentation. - Develop and extend Varda’s internal PLC framework and EtherCAT tooling to support evolving program needs. - Contribute to architecture decisions for real-time control implementation (e.g., evaluating PLC-based TwinCAT 3 vs. Linux-based approaches for high-frequency control). - Build cabinets and wire panels, owning systems end-to-end from electrical design through commissioning. - Partner with propulsion, avionics, GNC, and manufacturing teams to deliver test systems.
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