System Engineering (Mechanical)

Mechanical Engineer — Munition System
Cephas Consultancy Services Private Limited San Francisco or Los Angeles Washington, California, United States

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.

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.

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).

Working English, written and verbal.

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.

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.

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