Rainmaker Technology Corporation
Lead Instrumentation Engineer
El Segundo, CA
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 23 hours ago
PythonForecastingEmbedded SystemsAerospace EngineeringElectrical EngineeringSignal ProcessingSensorsResearchLeadershipCommunication
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About the role
- You will translate scientific measurement needs into instruments that can survive flight, produce calibrated data, and become reliable parts of Rainmaker's operational system.
- Within your first nine months, the instrument must successfully fly and produce in-cloud measurements of particle size distribution, phase, and concentration that can be validated against reference instrumentation.
- This is a technical leadership role, not primarily a people-management role.
Responsibilities
- Own instrument delivery from scientific requirement through architecture, detailed design, fabrication, integration, calibration, flight testing, validation, and production transition.
- Make and document critical tradeoffs across optical performance, sampling volume, spatial resolution, size, weight, power, thermal behavior, vibration, environmental exposure, compute, data rate, and manufacturability.
- Identify missing capabilities and determine whether they should be supplied by dedicated hires, existing Rainmaker engineers, contractors, advisors, vendors, or research partners.
- Design calibration and validation campaigns, including comparison against commercial cloud-particle and icing instruments.
- Lead flight integration and resolve issues discovered in laboratory, ground, and in-cloud testing.
- Develop Rainmaker's longer-term atmospheric-instrumentation roadmap based on which measurements would most improve forecasting, targeting, intervention analysis, and scientific understanding.
Requirements
- A degree in electrical engineering, optical engineering, aerospace engineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent evidence of exceptional instrument-development ability.
- Experience setting requirements, interfaces, error or performance budgets, verification methods, and test plans for multidisciplinary hardware.
- Experience making hardware work outside the laboratory under real thermal, vibration, contamination, alignment, power, and communications constraints.
- Ability to distinguish a scientifically interesting prototype from a calibrated and supportable operational instrument.
- You will personally make engineering decisions, build and test hardware, and solve integration problems while assembling the internal, external, and vendor support required to deliver the system.
Nice to have
- Experience with digital holography, high-speed imaging, lasers, cloud-particle probes, aerosol instruments, or optical particle characterization.
- Familiarity with atmospheric measurements, cloud microphysics, calibration, measurement uncertainty, or field campaigns.
- Experience designing within aerospace size, weight, power, vibration, thermal, and environmental constraints.
- Familiarity with scientific Python, data acquisition, embedded systems, signal processing, or reconstruction pipelines.
- Experience selecting and managing specialized vendors or contract manufacturers.
- What Success Looks Like
- Within your first nine months, Rainmaker will have successfully flown the prototype on a Rainmaker UAS and validated its in-cloud measurements against reference instrumentation.
Skills
- Research and engineering at Rainmaker are attached directly to operations.
Benefits
- Significant stock options with high potential upside as an early-stage company
- Full health coverage (medical, dental, and vision insurance)
- Paid parental leave for both parents
Company info
- What We're Looking For
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