Mechanical Engineer — Munition System

Mechanical Engineer — Munition System Cephas Consultancy Services Private Limited San Francisco or Los Angeles Washington, California, United States About this position Job Id :CLI-45424-7 Job Type: Direct hire Recruiter 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. 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr Cephas Consultancy Services Private Limited