Mechanical Engineer

Mechanical Engineer – Mid‑senior level
• 5 Years experience
• Bachelor’s degree
• Engineering
• Defense & Space
• 1 position
• No relocation assistance
• No visa sponsorship

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.

Kela Technologies (Kela Defense)

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.
• 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.

• 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 (Solid Works, 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.

• 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, Solid Works Simulation, Onshape FEA).
• Injection‑mold and metal‑casting DFM.
• FPV / small‑UAV background — payload integration, mass/CG sensitivity.

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.