Radiation Metrology and Test Engineer
About Cowboy Space Corp
Mission
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.
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Current energy and data systems rely on complex logistics and outdated infrastructure.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.