Mechanical Engineer - Airframes & Mechanisms

Mechanical Engineer - Airframes & Mechanisms

About Askari Defense

Modern warfare is dictated by robotics. Autonomous bombing drones and robotic ground systems are reshaping every battlefield on Earth. Any nation that cannot stop them loses.

Askari develops high-performance, fully-autonomous kinetic intercept systems that counter unmanned aerial and robotic threats in the world's most demanding operational environments. We build deployable systems for real-world constraints, urgent missions, and operators who cannot wait years for capability, and are continuously evolving our systems because the robotic threat evolves daily.

We are a tight team of top engineers and scientists from Skydio, Hermeus, Near Earth Autonomy, Area-I/Anduril, Raytheon, Sandia National Laboratories, and GTRI. We work directly with elite end-users, turning emerging battlefield requirements into rugged, scalable, mission-ready defenses.

Come build alongside elite engineers on a generational mission to defend the Western world. Candidly, we hold ourselves to an exceptionally high bar: the work is demanding, the pace is intense, and the mission requires people willing to go all in. For the right person, it will be more rewarding than any previous job. Askari is a place for builders serious about mastery, ownership, exponential growth, and delivering capability when it matters most.

As warfare becomes increasingly robotic, distributed, and fast-moving, the defense industrial base needs a new model:
Askari is defining that model.

If protecting humanity from the coming age of robotic warfare is the mission you have been waiting for, this is where you do it.

About the role

As a Mechanical Engineer for Airframes and Mechanisms
, you will own the mechanical architecture, design, build, and flight validation of new airframes and mechanical systems for our high-performance UAS intercept platforms.

You will turn evolving mission requirements and vehicle concepts into real hardware: compact mechanisms, structural load paths, subsystem packaging, mechanical interfaces, fixtures, and manufacturable airframes that survive field handling, vibration, launch, flight loads, and repeated iteration.

This role is for an incredibly first-principles engineer who is equal parts mechanisms designer and hands-on builder. You move quickly across the full loop, from trade study to design, build, test, and validation, and you upgrade your first-principles models the moment the data demands more fidelity.

You make hard structural and packaging trades, create elegant solutions under severe constraints, and personally build and test the hardware. You thrive in early ambiguity, cutting through the noise to find the few constraints that actually matter, and you prioritize physical reality over opinion
.

Above all, you have a track record of novel mechanical system design
. You have personally taken complex physical systems from concept through CAD, prototyping, test, failure analysis, and real-world validation. Ideally, you spend your free time building drones, airplanes, robots, mechanisms, or strange machines because you cannot help yourself.

Passion coupled with engineering mastery are the two most important things we are looking for.

You will spearhead airframe and mechanisms development, working with the aerodynamics, rotorcraft, GNC, perception, electrical, and manufacturing teams to integrate their subsystems into coherent, rugged, flight-proven vehicles.

What you'll do

You will own mechanical architecture for new airframes and vehicle configurations, from clean-sheet layout and first-principles trades through CAD, prototyping, bench test, flight test, and iteration. You will work across the aerodynamics, rotorcraft, GNC, perception, electrical, and manufacturing teams, but the mechanical architecture, airframe structures, mechanisms, and packaging trades are yours to drive.

You will focus on problems in all of the following areas:

• Airframe & Mechanical Architecture: Own mechanical architecture for new airframes and vehicle configurations, from clean-sheet layout and first-principles trades through CAD, prototyping, bench test, flight test, and iteration.
• Mechanisms…