Lead Manufacturing Engineer

Location: Huntsville, AL | Shift: A Shift, Monday–Friday | Level: Engineer – Manufacturing Sr (L4) About The Role Blue Origin is seeking a Senior Manufacturing Engineer to serve as the Manufacturing Engineering Subject Matter Expert across two of our most critical propulsion programs: BE-7 and Blue Thrusters. This is a high-visibility, high-impact staff role reporting directly to the Director of Operations. BE-7 is entering qualification with production on the near horizon. Blue Thrusters encompasses multiple thruster variants currently in research and development, all requiring rapid transition to production. This person will be the connective tissue across both programs — setting the manufacturing standard, driving speed and decisiveness, and building the ME capability of the entire team. This is not a role for someone who optimizes things that shouldn't exist. We need someone who can identify waste at its root, eliminate it, and teach others to do the same. Key Responsibilities Cross-Program ME Leadership Serve as the Manufacturing Engineering SME across BE-7 and Blue Thrusters value streams, splitting time equally between both programs Establish and enforce manufacturing best practices across all ME value streams; mentor and guide MEs at all levels to raise the technical floor of the entire organization Drive a culture of speed, decisiveness, and first-principles thinking — challenge MEs to eliminate processes that shouldn't exist before optimizing the ones that should Represent Manufacturing Engineering in high-visibility program forums, design reviews, and leadership readouts Serve as the technical escalation point for complex manufacturing problems across both programs; break down ambiguous failures to their root physical and materials-level causes Design for Manufacturability (DFM/DFx) Provide assertive, data-backed DFM feedback to design engineers — including those resistant to change — and drive producibility improvements that reduce cost, cycle time, and rework Engage early in the design lifecycle to influence hardware before it becomes expensive to change Lead DFM/DFA reviews across both programs and drive outcomes into actionable engineering change requests Apply first-principles and materials science knowledge to evaluate design decisions at the physics level, not just the process level Production Readiness & NPI Lead manufacturing readiness activities for BE-7 qualification and the transition to production Develop and execute NPI strategies for Blue Thrusters variants, building scalable manufacturing processes from the ground up Architect production systems capable of supporting medium #J-18808-Ljbffr