Mechanical Engineer — Munition System

A client is 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. This is a full-time on-site position with locations in either,

• San Francisco, CA.
• Los Angeles, CA.
• Washington, DC.

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).
• 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.