Avionics Engineer

Company Overview

You’ll join Fortastra’s Engineering Division, responsible for the design, development, and test of flight systems across our autonomous spacecraft portfolio. The avionics function owns the electrical and computing backbone of the vehicle - flight computers, sensor interfaces, power distribution, and communications that enable autonomous operations in complex orbital environments.

We recently closed a $30M Series A to build the future of on-orbit security and we’re just getting started!

The Role

Fortastra is seeking a Sr. Avionics Engineer to design and deliver spacecraft avionics hardware and embedded systems through the full product lifecycle from concept and architecture, through PCB design and bring-up, to integration on flight hardware. This is a hands-on design engineering role for an Electrical Engineer who enjoys owning boards and systems end-to-end rather than specializing narrowly in analysis or test.

You will architect avionics subsystems, design PCBs, select components, and bring up hardware in the lab. While spacecraft experience is ideal, we are also open to candidates from automotive EVs, robotics, and defense who have strong EE design backgrounds and have shipped mission-critical hardware.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of avionics hardware: concept, architecture, schematic capture, PCB layout review, bring-up, integration, and support to flight.
• Design flight computers and support boards, including processor, memory, power management, sensor/actuator interfaces, and communications interfaces.
• Select and integrate electrical components (MCUs/SoCs, FPGAs, memories, sensors, transceivers, power devices) appropriate for reliable operation in demanding environments.
• Define and implement board-level interfaces and data buses (e.g., CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, Ethernet, SpaceWire) across the spacecraft avionics network.
• Develop and maintain Interface Control Documents (ICDs) for avionics connections to GNC, power, propulsion, and payload subsystems.
• Bring up new boards in the lab: write simple test firmware, debug hardware issues, and validate functionality using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other instrumentation.
• Collaborate with embedded software and flight software engineers to integrate low-level drivers, bootloaders, and health monitoring with the hardware you design.
• Contribute to power architecture and distribution within avionics assemblies, including protections, filtering, and load management.
• Apply design-for-test and design-for-reliability principles so boards can be efficiently validated, qualified, and flown.