Senior Manager, Mechanical Engineering - Drone

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of mechanical engineers responsible for the airframe, fuselage, wings or rotor arms, landing gear, and structural components of our drone platforms
• Set technical direction on the tradeoffs between weight, strength, aerodynamics, flight time, and payload capacity that determine whether an aircraft flies well
• Guide your team's integration of propulsion, batteries, avionics, and payloads into the airframe, including packaging, mounting, cooling, and cable routing
• Oversee structural, thermal, and vibration analysis across the team, and use flight and test data to validate and improve designs
• Drive a culture of rapid prototyping: build, assemble, and iterate on real hardware, and support flight testing and field operations alongside your team
• Lead failure and crash investigations, drive root cause analysis, and turn lessons into design improvements across the team
• Own design, analysis, and validation quality at the component, assembly, and fully integrated aircraft level
• Champion design for manufacturability, repairability, and field serviceability across your team's work

Job requirements

• BS/MS in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field
• 12+ years of experience designing hardware and shipping products, ideally for drones, UAS, or aircraft
• 7+ years of experience leading and managing mechanical engineering teams
• Hands-on experience designing flight vehicles or flight-critical structures, such as airframes, wings, fuselages, rotor arms, or landing gear
• Strong understanding of what makes an aircraft fly: weight, structures, aerodynamic loads, stability, and propulsion integration
• Experience designing lightweight structures, including composites, carbon fiber, and aerospace-grade metals
• Experience with design for manufacturing across methods such as CNC machining, composite layup, sheet metal, and additive manufacturing
• Proficiency in CAD, SolidWorks preferred, for 3D design and modification