Senior Mechanical Engineer, Drone

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own the mechanical design of our drone platforms, including airframe, fuselage, wings or rotor arms, landing gear, and structural components
• Make the tradeoffs between weight, strength, aerodynamics, flight time, and payload capacity that determine whether an aircraft flies well
• Integrate propulsion, batteries, avionics, and payloads into the airframe, including packaging, mounting, cooling, and cable routing
• Perform structural, thermal, and vibration analysis, and use flight and test data to validate and improve the design
• Prototype quickly: build, assemble, and iterate on real hardware, and support flight testing and field operations
• Analyze failures and crashes, drive root cause, and turn lessons into design improvements
• Own the design, analysis, and validation at the component, assembly, and fully integrated aircraft level
• Design for manufacturability, repairability, and field serviceability

Job requirements

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience designing hardware and shipping products, ideally for drones, UAS, or aircraft
• 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
• Hands-on prototyping and fabrication skills, and comfort building and testing real aircraft