Automation Engineer

Job Description

Rockets have not gotten wider. Satellites need far more power than they used to. The only way through is structures that pack into a fairing and unfold into something massive on orbit.

Job Description

Rockets have not gotten wider. Satellites need far more power than they used to. The only way through is structures that pack into a fairing and unfold into something massive on orbit.

Gama is building that: ultra-light deployable solar arrays, from 3 kW to over 100 kW, in a factory sized for 100 MW a year. Almost nothing about this exists off the shelf. Inventing an array is one thing Building thousands of them, to tolerance, on a line that does not stop, is another.

We are hiring an automation engineer to own that line. You do not need to have worked on a solar array. You do need to have built something new from nothing and made it work at scale. Gama operates with extreme ownership: you own the outcome, not just the parts or the process.

Your Mission Will Be To

• Design, commission and improve robotic handling, motion control, sensors and tooling for the solar array production line.
• Own the control layer: PLC programming, HMIs, data acquisition and the data we pull from every station to know how the line is really performing.
• Drive design trades and influence the product from a manufacturing perspective. Requirements at Gama are a starting hypothesis; you are expected to challenge them and make them better. Start from physics, not from heritage.
• Design for a production line, not a one-off. 100 MW a year means every part has to be made thousands of times.
• Get hands‑on with hardware. Prototype in the morning, put it in the line in the afternoon, learn from what broke, iterate.
• Diagnose electrical, mechanical and software problems to reduce downtime and improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you: mentor, review, and become the person others come to when the line stops and nobody knows why.

Requirements

Must have

• Strong experience with automated production equipment, material handling and inspection systems. You have owned a large part of the production equipment in a previous role and gone through multiple design cycles.
• Hands‑on PLC programming and industrial control systems design.
• You design your own fixtures and tooling in CAD and get them made.
• Experience working with equipment suppliers, system integrators and engineering contractors.
• Any demanding industry : what matters is that the line did not exist before, you built it, and it ran reliably.
• Roughly 5+ years of relevant experience, but we care far more about what you built than how long you have been working.
• Professional English. French is a plus, not a requirement.
• Strong analytical skills, a proactive attitude, excellent interpersonal skills and unbounded curiosity

Nice to have

• Hands‑on experience in photovoltaic production lines
• Machine vision and inspection systems
• Robot programming

This role is probably not for you if your typical work has been executing a design against a standard or requirements list handed to you, or if you are most comfortable working in a rigidly defined engineering process. At Gama, everyone is a systems engineer and we embrace the ownership and the messy reality of hardware development to produce world‑changing products.