Mission Planning Autonomy Engineer III Verified today

Mission Planning Autonomy Engineer III (Simulation & Modeling) - Blue Ring

You will join Blue Origin's Blue National Security team within Ground & Spaceflight Operations (GSO) to develop, test, and deploy autonomy for the Mission Planning System (MPS). MPS is cloud-native ground software that plans, schedules, validates, and dispatches activities across a fleet of Blue Ring spacecraft. You will work closely with space vehicle, flight dynamics, and mission operations teams to move Blue Ring ground operations from human-in-the-loop toward human-on-the-loop.

Blue Ring is a hybrid solar-electric and chemical-propelled spacecraft providing mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity for national security missions. You will build the planning and scheduling engines, resource models, and simulation environments that enable MPS to generate, repair, and safely execute plans with progressively less operator intervention, and you will build the evidence that proves each step is safe. This role can be filled as an autonomy-focused software engineer or as a simulation and modeling engineer.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, verify and deploy MPS planning and scheduling capabilities, including automated activity scheduling, deconfliction, replanning, and course-of-action generation across multiple spacecraft.
• Build and evolve the MPS constraint engine and resource models (power, energy storage, onboard data volume, link budget, attitude keep-out, propellant/delta-V) used to validate plans before promotion and execution.
• Develop the safety gates, runtime assurance checks, and fail-closed behaviors that govern when MPS may act automatically versus when an operator must approve or can veto.
• Develop simulation and modeling capability for autonomy verification: spacecraft resource and behavior models, scenario generation, deterministic replay of recorded operations, Monte Carlo and stress campaigns, and shadow-mode comparison of automated plans against operator decisions.
• Extend the spacecraft and ground station simulator to the fidelity needed to verify autonomy, and integrate it with the integration test framework and Software-in-the-Loop and Hardware-in-the-Loop environments.
• Implement standards-based interfaces that let mission plans, tasking, and status interoperate with U.S. Government and partner systems, including CCSDS mission operations and navigation data standards, over enterprise message brokers.
• Work with the Astrodynamics and Trajectory eXecution (ATX) team, flight dynamics, command and control, ground communications, and flight operations to define software requirements, interfaces, architectures, and designs.
• Develop rapid prototypes to prove out concepts, evaluate scheduling and optimization approaches, and quantify technical risks.
• Produce user documentation for software architecture, design, autonomy level assessments, verification plans, user manuals and training material.
• Follow software development processes that meet Blue Origin and customer-required standards to ensure software safety and reliability.
• Support frequent update cycles in support of pre-flight testing, mission rehearsals, and operations training events.
• Support mission control software operations responsibilities during operator training, ground data system verification and validation, spacecraft integration, and flight.

Minimum Qualifications

• B.S. or higher degree in computer science, computer engineering, aerospace engineering, operations research, mathematics, physics, or related field or equivalent experience.
• 5 or more years of software development experience.
• Experience in software engineering over the full lifecycle, including system design and analysis, requirement capture and development, software implementation and verification, system integration, qualification, and release.
• Experience developing at least one of: scheduling, planning, or optimization software; or simulation and modeling software for physical or operational systems.
• Experience in software build automation, continuous integration, configuration management, verification, and deployment.
• Demonstrated software development skills in multiple software languages, with ability to implement in the language most appropriate to the problem-domain.
• Familiarity with Linux environment and comfortable with basic Unix system administration activities.
• Ability to earn trust and maintain positive and professional relationships.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing ground software for spaceflight operations, or autonomy for safety-critical systems (spacecraft, aircraft, robotics, or automated vehicles).
• Proficiency in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, pytest) and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Protobuf, REST, PostgreSQL).
• Experience with scheduling and optimization methods (e.g., OR-Tools/CP-SAT, MILP, heuristic search) and timeline, resource, or temporal-constraint modeling.
• Experience with simulation and verification, including discrete-event simulation, Monte Carlo analysis, digital twins, deterministic replay, and runtime assurance or levels-of-autonomy frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise message brokers (e.g., ActiveMQ Artemis, AMQP, MQTT) and containerized cloud deployment (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS; GovCloud a plus).
• Familiarity with CCSDS communications protocols and standards.
• Familiarity with one or more of the following: spacecraft activity planning, scheduling, and command sequencing; ground station contact planning and scheduling; spacecraft subsystem modeling (power, thermal, propulsion); astrodynamics, orbit propagation, and ephemeris products (e.g., JPL MONTE, SPICE, CCSDS formats); fault management and anomaly response.
• Familiarity with machine learning or LLM-based agents as advisory inputs to deterministic decision systems.
• Active TS/SCI clearance, or the ability to obtain one.

Compensation and Benefits

Base pay range for VA applicants is $164,652.00 to $230,512.80. Other site ranges may differ.

Benefits include medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability, 401(k) with company match up to 5%, Education Support Program, stock options for all regular employees (20+ hours/week), and up to four weeks paid time off per year plus up to 14 company-paid holidays. Relocation provided.

Additional Information

Interviews will include a technical assessment. Applications accepted on an ongoing basis until requisition closed.