Senior Mechanical Engineer, Drone

The role

You will design the airframe, structures, and mechanical systems for drone platforms. You will manage the full product design lifecycle from concept and prototype through flight test and production.

What you will do

• Own the mechanical design of drone platforms including airframe, fuselage, wings, rotor arms, landing gear, and structural components
• Make tradeoffs between weight, strength, aerodynamics, flight time, and payload capacity
• Integrate propulsion, batteries, avionics, and payloads into the airframe
• Perform structural, thermal, and vibration analysis
• Prototype, build, assemble, and iterate on real hardware
• Support flight testing and field operations
• Analyze failures and crashes to drive root cause and design improvements
• Own design, analysis, and validation at component, assembly, and integrated aircraft levels
• Design for manufacturability, repairability, and field serviceability
• Work cross-functionally with autonomy, avionics, electrical, software, and flight test teams

Required qualifications

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience designing hardware and shipping products
• Hands-on experience designing flight vehicles or flight-critical structures
• Strong understanding of weight, structures, aerodynamic loads, stability, and propulsion integration
• Experience designing lightweight structures including composites, carbon fiber, and aerospace-grade metals
• Experience with design for manufacturing across CNC machining, composite layup, sheet metal, and additive manufacturing
• Proficiency in CAD
• Hands-on prototyping and fabrication skills
• Comfort building and testing real aircraft

Nice to have

• SolidWorks preferred
• Ability to support flight test and field operations
• Experience designing, drawing, and prototyping custom cable harnesses
• Demonstrated experience in FEA/CAE (structural, thermal, vibration, and shock)

About the company

Applied Intuition, Inc. is a Silicon Valley company creating digital infrastructure for physical AI. It services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries.