Lead Instrumentation Engineer

What You'll Do

• Own instrument delivery from scientific requirement through architecture, detailed design, fabrication, integration, calibration, flight testing, validation, and production transition.
• Establish the instrument's system requirements, interfaces, performance budget, verification plan, schedule, and technical risks.
• 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.
• Coordinate electrical, embedded, data-acquisition, reconstruction-software, UAS-integration, atmospheric-science, manufacturing, and field-validation work.
• 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.
• Define production acceptance tests, calibration procedures, maintenance requirements, field documentation, and configuration control.
• Develop Rainmaker's longer-term atmospheric-instrumentation roadmap based on which measurements would most improve forecasting, targeting, intervention analysis, and scientific understanding.

What We're Looking For

• A degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, optical engineering, aerospace engineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent evidence of exceptional instrument-development ability.
• A record of delivering complex sensing or scientific hardware from ambiguous requirements to validated operation.
• Deep hands-on strength in at least one relevant discipline, paired with enough systems judgment to integrate optics, mechanics, electronics, embedded control, software, and data products.
• Experience setting requirements, interfaces, error or performance budgets, verification methods, and test plans for multidisciplinary hardware.
• Strong mechanical and electrical intuition and willingness to build, assemble, debug, and test hardware personally.
• 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.
• Strong written and verbal communication across scientists, engineers, operators, manufacturers, and external partners.
• High agency and comfort establishing direction without a mature instrumentation organization or predetermined roadmap.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing airborne, UAS-borne, atmospheric, remote-sensing, particle-imaging, optical, lidar, radar, or other scientific instruments.
• 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.
• Experience transitioning low-volume scientific hardware into repeatable production and field support.
• 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 90 days, you will have established a credible system architecture, validation plan, program schedule, and resourcing plan for the instrument while retiring the highest-risk technical unknowns through hands-on testing.

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.

For the following cloud-seeding season, Rainmaker will have a production-ready instrument with documented calibration, acceptance testing, integration, maintenance, data-processing, and field-support procedures.

Beyond the first instrument, you will have established a disciplined instrument-development capability and a prioritized roadmap for the atmospheric measurements Rainmaker should own.

Benefits

• Significant stock options with high potential upside as an early-stage company
• 401(k) with employer matching
• Full health coverage (medical, dental, and vision insurance)
• Relocation assistance provided (if applicable)
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid parental leave for both parents
• Lunch provided when working in-office and a fully stocked kitchenette
• Free EV charging at the HQ