Lead Instrumentation Engineer

About Rainmaker

Rainmaker is pioneering a modern cloud-seeding system to increase precipitation, improve water availability, and address severe-weather challenges. We combine atmospheric science, weather-resistant UAS, radar and satellite observations, numerical weather prediction, novel sensing systems, and sustainable seeding technologies to design, operate, and evaluate precipitation-enhancement programs.

Research and engineering at Rainmaker are attached directly to operations. We build instruments, models, aircraft, and decision systems that are tested in the atmosphere and improved with every deployment.

About the Role

Rainmaker is hiring a Lead Instrumentation Engineer to own the technical development of our atmospheric sensing hardware. You will translate scientific measurement needs into instruments that can survive flight, produce calibrated data, and become reliable parts of Rainmaker's operational system.

Your first mission is concrete: deliver a new airborne cloud-particle imaging instrument for integration on a Rainmaker UAS. Within your first nine months, the instrument must successfully fly and produce in-cloud measurements of particle size distribution, phase, and concentration that can be validated against reference instrumentation. You will then lead its transition into a production-ready system for the following cloud-seeding season.

This is a technical leadership role, not primarily a people-management role. You will personally make engineering decisions, build and test hardware, and solve integration problems while assembling the internal, external, and vendor support required to deliver the system.