Operational Performance Engineer, Mass Properties & Vehicle Performance

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own vehicle mass properties, including mass, center of gravity, and moments and products of inertia, across configurations and mission states for all supported programs.
• Own the vehicle mass fraction and CG envelope, ensuring mass properties satisfy vehicle-level requirements.
• Own moment of inertia tracking against Level 1 vehicle requirements for pitch, yaw, and roll.
• Assign, manage, and enforce subsystem and team-level mass budgets in coordination with configuration management and integration teams.
• Deliver weekly CG status and mass-versus-budget reporting by subsystem and team.
• Deliver weekly mass trend analysis, identifying which groups are trending heavy, the rate of growth, and the risk to vehicle closure.
• Support engineering trades as they pertain to weight impact, providing mass property data and analysis to inform design decisions.
• Own analytical-versus-actual weight reconciliation by obtaining actual part weights, evaluating the impact on the vehicle, and assessing readiness before build and flight.

Job requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 2+ years of relevant experience in vehicle performance, mass properties, vehicle design, flight dynamics, systems engineering, or a related discipline.
• Dedicated mass properties experience, including weight tracking, CG and inertia accounting, or mass budget management, on at least one complex aerospace vehicle program.
• Experience with configuration-controlled mass property records and multi-team mass budget management.
• Experience assessing weight impact of design trades and configuration changes at the vehicle level.
• Strong understanding of vehicle performance and the interactions among mass properties, aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, power, and controls.
• Experience using Python, Julia, MATLAB, or a similar technical computing language for engineering analysis.
• Ability to organize inputs from multiple disciplines, spot inconsistencies, and explain what they mean at the vehicle level.