Structures Design Lead

Swarm Aero•Oxnard, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Swarm Aero is redefining air power by building the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world. The company is moving quickly to launch the first aircraft designed specifically for swarming, as well as the Command & Control software to mobilize swarms of thousands of heterogeneous autonomous assets and empower human operators to achieve superhuman results. The team has created and exited multiple startups, negotiated defense deals worth billions of dollars, and designed and built 30+ novel aircraft, with aerospace experience from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic. This role is for a Structures Design Lead who has spent years doing exceptional work on programs that will never have their name on them, watched decisions get made by committee, seen great ideas die in review cycles, and shipped hardware they are proud of, but always wondered what they could do if someone just got out of the way and let them build. The company is looking for someone to join a small group of engineers in Southern California who are designing an aircraft from scratch – a genuinely new machine built for autonomous swarming at scale. The team is small on purpose, with no layers or bureaucracy, just a handful of the best structures and airframe engineers in the country, working with urgency and the freedom to execute. The ideal candidate has designed composite airframe structures that flew, owned programs from blank sheet to production hardware, and has the instincts that only come from doing it under real pressure. They think in load paths, laminates, and joints, and have done their best work on small teams where the answer had to come from them.

Requirements

Designed composite airframe structures that flew.
Owned the full arc from blank sheet to production hardware.
Intuition that only comes from doing it on real programs under real pressure.
Thinks in laminates, load paths, and joints.
Solved problems that didn't have a textbook answer.
Experience working on a small team where there was no one to hand off to.

Responsibilities

Driving structural design and development for the aircraft's airframe and composite structures from concept through production hardware.
Translating performance and weight targets into manufacturable designs.
Generating CAD that goes straight to hardware.
Sizing structure and joints under real constraints.
Setting the standards the team builds on.
Running design reviews.
Owning Design for Manufacturability (DFM).
Working directly with manufacturing and suppliers.
Mentoring the engineers around you.