Mechanical Engineer — Munition System

Experience level: Mid-senior Experience required: 5 Years Education level: Bachelors degree Job function: Engineering Industry: Defense & Space Compensation: $201000 - $225000 Total position: 1 Relocation assistance: No Visa sponsorship eligibility: No 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. End Client: Kela Technologies (Kela Defense) About the project Were 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 youll 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 youve 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 its 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. Youll 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.

Required Skills:

Mechanical Engineering Defense Aerospace FDM SLA CAD Prototyping