Lead Structural Stress Analysis Engineer — Nastran​/Patran

Give a bold aircraft design a rigorous structural foundation. Your analysis and test correlation will help ASKA understand how its airframe carries load, connecting design decisions to evidence the whole engineering team can use.

Lead ASKA's aircraft structural stress analysis and substantiation. Set analysis priorities, review load paths and margins, and guide the supporting stress engineer while coordinating with aircraft systems and structural design.

Employment Full-time proposed

Location & work arrangement Eagle Field
· Palo Alto area / remote for analysis and design to be defined; hands-on integration and test visits to be discussed; availability for occasional testing at Eagle Field Airport required, with advance coordination

Structural-analysis technical leadership, review of stress reports and delivery of the airframe substantiation baseline.

The Lead Airframe Design Engineer owns airframe geometry, structural layout, physical packaging and design decisions; the Airframe Design Engineer creates detailed parts and assemblies. Loads supplies aircraft load cases and aeroelastic assessments. Stress evaluates strength, buckling, fatigue and structural margins and recommends design changes. Airframe Design implements and releases geometry changes. Mass Properties maintains weight/CG records. Propeller engineering owns blades and hubs;
Aircraft Systems coordinates vehicle requirements and subsystem integration.

• Lead and review structural-analysis work, assign priorities to the supporting stress engineer, and resolve analysis assumptions with aircraft systems and design engineers.
• Build and maintain global and local finite-element models using Patran for model preparation and results review and Nastran for analysis.
• Represent and verify load paths, boundary conditions, material properties and joint idealizations in analysis models with the responsible design and loads engineers.
• Perform static strength, buckling and modal assessments, checking mesh sensitivity, equilibrium and whether idealizations suit the engineering question.
• Evaluate laminates, metallic fittings, fasteners and bonded joints using suitable failure criteria and independent calculations.
• Assess fatigue or damage-tolerance implications for assigned components and coordinate specialist analysis where the substantiation scope requires it.
• Plan structural tests and correlate measured stiffness, strain and modal response with analytical predictions.
• Assess the structural effect of design changes and manufacturing deviations, and document recommended dispositions for authorized review.
• Prepare controlled stress reports covering assumptions, load cases, margins, model validation and unresolved limitations.
• Own and continually improve structural-analysis verification and model-to-test correlation methods; agree acceptance criteria and independent checks with relevant specialists, and use discrepancies to strengthen analysis quality and coverage.

• Bachelor’s degree in aerospace or mechanical engineering, or equivalent demonstrated structural-analysis expertise.
• 5+ years of aircraft structural stress analysis, including responsibility for documented substantiation.
• Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience with Nastran AND minimum 3 years with Patran, covering finite-element model preparation, solver setup, model checking and engineering interpretation of results.
• Strong understanding of composite and metallic structural behavior, joints, buckling, load paths and failure modes.
• Experience verifying finite-element results with hand calculations and correlating predictions with physical measurements.
• Ability to communicate analysis…