https://www.blueorigin.com/careers
Needless to say, there are tons of interesting problems to solve and opportunities to make a huge impact.
I'm not saying you should be willing to die for your work. But historically someone always seems to be. Not least of all in the space business.
Sorry but this comment and some child comments are truly shocking for me in their historical ignorance.
Reality of an engineering employee even for such a company is, success means bringing tiny increase ineffectiveness, weight reduction etc. into super complex system. No truly world changing discoveries. If you are alone, do whatever you want with your life. But once you go for family, working 70-hour weeks is plain stupid, selfish or just extremely bad deal. No work is worth making decisions that you will regret for the rest of your life.
I've had many different kinds of managers. I've had the type that encouraged me to slow down and think carefully about what I'm doing at every step, and I've had the kind that keeps a watchful eye and is always asking "Why isn't this done yet?" Under the latter I started grinding my teeth at night and started engineering things in a fairly brittle way... but my rote productivity was higher than it had ever been. Managerial styles are all engineering decisions just as any other are.
There must be a lot of stuff that you need which is not really limited by US law and that people could work on from their home countries. Examples just in software engineering: Cloud infrastructure, user interfaces, communication platforms, open source projects that are 90% of where you needed them to be to use them, BSP layers for embedded systems you want to use.
If only it was that simple - in a former job I designed systems for a non-US multinational that did ITAR work and it was incredibly painful to work out the rules for who could or could not see particular items of data.
>Applicants must be a United States citizen ... >We hold all information confidential and are an equal opportunity employer.
[1]Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, protects applicants and employees from discrimination in hiring, promotion, discharge, pay, fringe benefits, job training, classification, referral, and other aspects of employment, on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), or national origin.
[1]http://www1.eeoc.gov/employers/upload/eeoc_self_print_poster...
"Employers should not ask whether or not a job applicant is a United States citizen before making an offer of employment... the law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract" [1]
However, from the job listings, it sounds like that all employees would have access to regulated information, thus exempting them from the prohibition:
"...U.S. citizen, permanent resident alien or otherwise able to review all export-controlled technical information."
[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/inquiries_citizenship.cfm
The Chinese do silly things like blow up satellites (causing space debris), to show their might - things that the US had done 30 years ago.
Whereas, the US has systems that can track and predict all space debris of sizes greater than 1/2 inch.
It's just orders of magnitude more advanced.
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/u-s-navy-missile-...
On the other hand the argument was about China's technical abilities and intercepting something in a higher orbit with a faster closing velocity is harder to do than the US's anti-satellite test. The Chinese proved they could destroy surveillance satellites and the US didn't really show that they could do the same.
That said, with so many viable missile platforms, why would Blue Origin be used for that?
I know very little about the vertical. As a matter of principle, I typically avoid gigs that involve government funding. However, this one is more interesting than most.
What do you mean?
The only company I've worked for for any length of time that was funded in part by government funds was WNYC, which was a blast!
Public Radio to me is one of those times where the broken clock happens to show the right time of day. Sure, it's government funding, but the content we created was really stellar.
I mean, on some higher political level, there's always the "you use the roads" argument, but I'm talking about having to report to someone in the government about how their funding is being used. That's what I object to.
But if you're worried about launching military communication satellites, well, they probably will be at some point.
[1] Not my view of what's worthwhile of course.
It is the world's nature.
Hopefully, not a literal impact :)
I considered applying a few months ago but my current employer (large conglom-o-corp that ate my old company) has made me nervous about being walled-off as a code-monkey.
Is there a path to from my current position to something more systems related? Has anyone made this transition before?
Are you serious? People come to be systems programmers with no programming experience, obviously with some web/server experience will be even more suited to learn it.