R&D Engineer II (SRM Ballistician) (Remote Option Available)

General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems is seeking a Ballistician for its Solid Rocket Motor Engineering Team. The role develops rocket motor concepts and refines grain and nozzle designs, while collaborating across engineering, analysis, chemistry, and manufacturing. It also involves testing, data analysis, and manufacturing oversight.

Responsibilities:

• Generating rocket motor concepts from high level thrust/burn time requirements, and refining into detailed grain and nozzle designs
• Collaboration to define propellant grain geometries and optimize burn rates, thrust curves, and pressure profiles
• Work with design engineers to communicate operating pressures, analysts to communicate temperature and load profiles, chemists to communicate ballistic requirements, and manufacturing engineers to ensure grain geometry can be produced
• Conducts research, design, and development activities with the goal of developing new or improved products, processes, or services
• Collaborates with internal manufacturing partners, contract manufacturers, designers and product specialists to optimize designs for manufacturability
• Applies research theories, principles, and models when conducting experiments and research activities
• Conducts market research, tracks projects, builds spreadsheets evaluating trade space, designs presentation slides, and executes business-oriented tasks
• Summarizes research results and communicates findings to internal and external bodies
• Assesses the scope of research projects and ensures projects are on time and within budget
• Develops technical documentation for all projects
• Utilizes CAD (Computer Aided Design) or CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) systems to model new designs and produce detailed engineering drawings
• Develop: Create rocket motor concepts to meet customer requirements
• Design and Analysis: Refine grain geometries and optimize burn rates, thrust and pressure curves in collaboration with other stakeholders
• Testing & Qualification: Lead static fire test campaigns and ground-based prototyping. Analyze test data to validate performance and investigate any anomalies
• Data Reduction: Reduce strand burner, subscale and fullscale motor data to determine burn rate properties of propellants
• Manufacturing Oversight: Oversee propellant casting, curing cycles, and review of tool designs

Requirements:

• Requires working knowledge and experience in own job discipline and broadens capabilities
• Associate's Degree and 2-4 years' experience
• Engineering degree required
• Proficient in Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint)
• Product innovation
• Product intelligence
• Product research
• Project scoping
• Quantitative research
• Research and development
• Research documentation
• Oral and written communication skills
• Critical thinking
• Analytical thinking
• Bachelor's Degree