Mechanical Engineer — Munition System

Job Title

Experience level:
Mid-senior Experience required: 5 Years Education level:
Bachelor's degree Job function:
Engineering Industry: Defense & Space Compensation: $201,000 - $225,000 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 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.

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 (Solid Works, 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 — 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, Solid Works 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.

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 (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.

Nice to have Experience with safety & arming (S&A) mechanisms, fuzing, pyrotechnics. Familiarity with MIL-STD-810 (environmental), MIL-STD-331 (fuze tests). FEA / structural simulation (Ansys, Solid Works Simulation, Onshape FEA).