Mechanical Engineer - Munition System

About the project:

We're building a small, safety-critical kinetic munition delivered by an FPV-class airframe. The system carries an electro mechanical safe and arm device (EMSAD) governed by a seven-state safety-arm-fire state machine, electromechanical safing features, and sensor suite. Everything has to survive flight loads, drops, vibration, and field handling - and fail safe at every step.

You will own the mechanical side end-to-end: from concept and CAD through prototypes, testing, and the transfer to production.

What you'll do

Design the munition housing, internal structure, and arming mechanism (S&A train, transport pin, motor-driven elements) in CAD.

Define the mechanical safety architecture together with the HW and SW leads - interlocks, out-of-line geometry, transport-pin retention, drop/impact behavior.

Spec materials, finishes, tolerances, and fasteners for the operating environment (temperature, vibration, humidity, salt fog as relevant).

Build prototypes in-house (3D print, CNC) and run iteration loops; hand off drawings and DFM packages to external machinists / injection-mold vendors.

Plan and execute mechanical qualification: drop, shock, vibration, environmental, mass-properties / CG checks, integration with the airframe.

Own the BOM, weight budget, and CG budget. Track them like the safety-critical numbers they are.

Work directly alongside the HW and SW engineers - PCB outline, connector placement, harnessing, mechanism actuation requirements come out of these conversations.

Required:

5+ years designing mechanical assemblies that go into the field - UAV payloads, defense, automotive, aerospace, or similar regulated/rugged domains.

Fluency in a parametric CAD tool (SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Onshape, Creo, NX - pick your favorite).

Comfort producing manufacturing-ready drawings: GD&T, tolerance stacks, surface finishes, fits.

Hands-on with prototyping: FDM/SLA printers, mill, lathe, basic machining sense.

Strong intuition for failure modes - you've broken things deliberately and know which question to ask next.

Working English, written and verbal.

Nice to have

Experience with safety & arming (S&A) mechanisms, fuzing, pyrotechnics, or anything else that has to be unambiguously safe before it's allowed to be dangerous.

Familiarity with MIL-STD-810 (environmental), MIL-STD-331 (fuze tests), or equivalent civilian standards.

FEA / structural simulation (Ansys, SolidWorks Simulation, Onshape FEA).

Injection-mold and metal-casting DFM.

FPV / small-UAV background - payload integration, mass/CG sensitivity.

How we work

Small team, short cycles, weekly hardware iterations. You'll have a desk next to the HW and SW engineers and a lab with prototyping kit. We expect you to be opinionated, to design for testability from day one, and to push back when the constraints do not make engineering sense.

Note : Candidate must be comfortable completing an initial 1-month onsite training period in Kearneysville, WV, after which they will relocate back to work from either San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Washington DC .