About this role
SAIC offers exciting and challenging opportunities to support NASA’s present and future human spaceflight programs at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas under the Safety and Mission Assurance Engineering (SMAEC III) Contract. This is an exciting time to be making history with the NASA SMA team assuring continuous human presence returning humans to the Moon and then to Mars safely. You will offer support through government collaboration with commercial space companies. You will apply design and operations knowledge and expertise in various areas of system safety, reliability, quality engineering and assurance, software, probabilistic risk assessment, and others.
Job Description:
- This position requires the ability to evaluate complex hardware and operational systems from a systems safety perspective, identify credible hazardous conditions, determine causes and controls, assess verification evidence, and document safety rationale in accordance with applicable program and NASA human spaceflight safety requirements.
- The engineer will work closely with systems engineering, design engineering, operations, reliability, quality, human factors, EVA, crew systems, and program safety organizations.
- Author, revise, and maintain system and hardware Hazard Reports throughout the applicable program lifecycle.
- Support design reviews and evaluate systems and planned operations for compliance with applicable safety requirements.
- Perform hazard analysis for assigned systems and projects to identify all potential hazards, hazard causes and necessary controls to mitigate risk to crew and mission success.
- Assist with the development of Test and Verification (T&V) requirements and review of T&V results to verify efficacy of hazard controls
- Perform qualitative and quantitative risk assessments based on relative strengths / weaknesses of hazard controls
- Coordinate with reliability engineers to ensure consistency between system safety and reliability analysis (e.g. Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) failure mode mapping to hazard causes and criticality assessments)
- Provide recommendations to program/project management regarding risk mitigations
- Present hazard analysis results and recommendations to NASA management for formal risk acceptance
- Evaluate anomalies, non-conformances and proposed changes to system design or planned operations for impacts to system safety and reliability analysis
- Participate in design reviews, program/project review boards, safety review panels and other technical forums to ensure safety and mission assurance risks are properly identified and addressed.
Required Education:
- Bachelors and five (5) years or more experience; Masters and three (3) years or more experience; PhD and 0 years related experience
Desired Education:
- Bachelor’s in Mechanical, Aerospace, Safety Engineering, or related discipline
Required Experience:
- Over 8 years of related experience
- Must be able to travel (minimal) and work shifts periodically
- Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills
- Ability to work effectively across multiple organizations / stakeholders and within a team environment
- Ability to work autonomously, with minimal management oversight, to prioritize work and accomplish tasks within tight schedule constraints
- Ability to visualize, articulate, and condense complex issues into concise, easily understood presentations
- Proven ability to produce high quality technical reports and deliver clear, effective technical presentations to senior management and customers.
- Candidates should have experience in system safety, hazard analysis, or hazard report development and be able to identify hazards, causes, controls, and verification methods.
- They must be able to interpret engineering drawings, specifications, tests, and procedures, and demonstrate strong technical writing skills for clear, defensible documentation.
- Effective collaboration across multidisciplinary engineering teams is also essential.
Desired Experience:
- Preferred candidates have experience supporting NASA human spaceflight programs and working within safety ‑ critical environments.
- They should be comfortable leading hazard documentation, collaborating across engineering teams, and presenting safety findings to review boards.
- Strong analytical skills, familiarity with NASA safety processes, and prior work with commercial space partners are highly valued.
Clearance:
- Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain a Public Trust Clearance.