Senior Mechanical Engineer (Maritime)

Odin Dynamics•Los Angeles, CA

23h

About The Position

Founded in 2025, Odin Dynamics is a defense technology company building autonomous underwater vehicles that will define the next era of undersea warfare. We are focused on delivering capable, resilient autonomous systems that strengthen the strategic advantage of the United States and its allied navies. We move fast, build real hardware, and operate with the urgency that the mission demands. We are building a new platform from the ground up. This is not a role where you will inherit a mature product with every architectural decision already made. You will take incomplete requirements, early hardware, and difficult physical constraints and turn them into dependable, production-ready mechanical systems that survive and perform at depth. We value rigorous engineering without unnecessary process. Decisions should be driven by physics, test data, and product outcomes—not inherited convention or documentation volume.

Requirements

Deep practical expertise in at least one of: hull and hydrodynamics, structures and integration, mechanisms and actuation, battery mechanical design, or propulsion.
Sufficient familiarity with adjacent mechanical domains to collaborate across subsystem boundaries.
Strong CAD proficiency and experience managing complex assemblies across multi-disciplinary teams.
Strong analytical skills across FEA and hand calculations, with sound engineering judgment about when to use each.
Demonstrated ability to design for manufacturing—you know how parts get made and you design accordingly.
Hands-on experience with prototyping, assembly, and test—you are comfortable in a shop and on a dock.
Experience reading and producing engineering drawings, defining tolerances, and managing interfaces.
Experience designing for demanding physical environments, accounting for factors such as pressure, thermal, vibration, corrosion, or long-duration reliability as relevant to your specialization.
Demonstrated ability to work from first principles, make progress with incomplete information, and rapidly iterate between design, analysis, fabrication, and test.
Ability to work independently with minimal oversight while collaborating closely across engineering disciplines.
Willingness to support field testing and sea trials when required.
U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.
Approximately five or more years of relevant mechanical engineering experience is preferred, but demonstrated technical depth, multidisciplinary problem-solving ability, and a record of delivering difficult systems matter more than a specific number of years.

Nice To Haves

Developing safety-critical, mission-critical, or high-reliability products.
Taking a mechanical system from a blank sheet through multiple design, analysis, test, and refinement cycles into production or operational deployment.
Underwater vehicles, marine systems, UAVs, robotics, aerospace, automotive, or other tightly integrated electromechanical products.
Design for pressure-loaded or submerged environments.
Corrosion engineering and material compatibility in seawater environments.
Battery pack mechanical, thermal, or enclosure design for demanding applications.
Rotating machinery, propulsor or propeller design, shaft sealing, or drivetrain integration.
Composite structures or advanced manufacturing methods.
Environmental qualification testing, including shock, vibration, pressure cycling, and thermal extremes.
Establishing or extending mechanical test and qualification environments.

Responsibilities

Serve as the Responsible Engineer for a major mechanical subsystem.
Develop greenfield mechanical designs from initial requirements and architecture through field-tested, production-ready hardware.
Produce detailed designs and complete assemblies in CAD, managing interfaces and integration across the vehicle.
Perform structural, thermal, and fluid analyses—using both hand calculations and FEA—and apply the judgment to know which approach a problem needs.
Select materials and design for the marine environment, accounting for pressure, corrosion, sealing, and long-duration reliability.
Design for manufacturing, working directly with machine shops, fabrication partners, and internal technicians to ensure designs translate cleanly from CAD to production.
Bring up, assemble, and validate hardware on the bench, in test fixtures, and in the water.
Define mechanical interfaces and coordinate closely with electrical, firmware, and software engineers to ensure clean cross-disciplinary integration.
Develop and execute test plans for your subsystem, from component-level validation through full-vehicle pressure testing and ocean trials.
Support production, investigate failures on deployed hardware, and own corrective improvements throughout the product lifecycle.
Produce concise, functional engineering documentation that enables fabrication, assembly, testing, operation, and future development.
Use AI-assisted design and analysis tools to accelerate work while independently validating outputs and maintaining a first-principles understanding of the resulting system.
Mentor other engineers and contribute to technical reviews without moving away from hands-on engineering.