Lead Structures & Analysis Engineer

Brelle•Los Alamitos, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

As a Lead Structures & Analysis Engineer, you will own the structural integrity of our products — from material selection and first-order sizing through detailed FEA, physical test, and correlation back to the model. You’ll work at the intersection of structures, materials, and the wider system. Our hardware lives in a demanding multi-physics environment (i.e. mechanical loads interacting with thermal, electrical, and safety requirements), so we’re especially interested in engineers who have worked on battery packs, energy storage, EV structures, spacecraft, aircraft, or motorsport, and who understand how structural decisions ripple through the rest of the system. You’ll have direct influence over architecture and a mandate to build the analysis capability you think the team needs.

Requirements

B.S. in Mechanical, Aerospace, Materials, or related engineering field (M.S. preferred).
8+ years of structural analysis experience on safety- or performance-critical hardware (automotive/EV, aerospace, launch, defense, motorsport, or similar), including time as a technical lead or responsible engineer.
Deep grounding in statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, fatigue, and fracture.
Expert proficiency with at least one commercial FEA suite (Ansys, Abaqus, Nastran, etc.) including pre/post tools (HyperMesh, Femap, etc.) — and a track record of validating models against physical test.
Strong materials background: selection, properties, allowables development, and testing of metallic and/or composite structures; familiarity with non-linear material behavior (plasticity, elastomers, adhesives).
Scripting ability in Python or MATLAB for analysis automation, data processing, and tool development; comfort leveraging AI tools to accelerate and enhance engineering workflows.
Clear, concise technical communication — written reports and live design-review defense of your margins.

Nice To Haves

Experience with battery packs, modules, or enclosures — structural integration of cells, crush/intrusion protection, drop and abuse testing, sealing, thermal-structural interaction, or vibration durability of energy storage systems.
Multi-physics fluency: coupled thermal-structural analysis, or working knowledge of how electrical, thermal, and safety requirements constrain structural design.
DFM awareness across casting, stamping, extrusion, machining, additive, and composite layup — and experience taking hardware from prototype to rate production.
Experience building analysis tools or methods adopted team or company-wide.

Responsibilities

Guide design from day one: Embed with design, manufacturing, and systems engineers to influence architecture early — load paths, joints, materials, and mass.
Support mass-optimization, manufacturing and cost/weight/performance trades.
Build and develop the team: Set the technical standard, grow engineers at all levels, and create an environment where the team does rigorous, independent work.
Own structural analysis end-to-end: Define load cases and environments, develop load paths, and perform sizing of primary and secondary structures using both classical hand calculations and finite element methods (linear and non-linear static, buckling, modal, random vibration, shock, fatigue, and fracture/damage tolerance).
Drive material selection: Lead research, trade studies across metallics, composites, polymers, and adhesives; account for environmental effects, manufacturing variability, and joint behavior.
Lead structural test campaigns: Define test plans, instrumentation (strain gauges, accelerometers, thermocouples, DIC), and pass/fail criteria for coupon, component, and assembly-level tests — static, dynamic, drop, crush, and abuse.
Close the loop on failures: Lead root-cause investigations of structural failures in test, production, or the field, and drive corrective actions back into design rules.
Communicate effectively across domains: Serve as the structural SME for your domain — present margins, risks, and recommendations clearly at design reviews and to leadership, and translate complex analysis into language the broader team can act on.