Founding Mechanical Engineer
Voltair
Other Engineering
San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 100k-165k / year + Equity
Voltair
Autonomous Drones for Earth Observation
Founding Mechanical Engineer
About the role
As a Founding Mechanical Engineer at Voltair, you will own airframe development and reliability testing of an all-weather, autonomous aircraft designed to enable persistent observability of the largest physical infrastructure in the world.
Key Responsibilities
- Airframe Weatherization. Design and implement sealing, gasketing, thermal anti-ice systems, conformal coating, and other environmental protection measures to ensure our robots can fly into rain, snow, and smoke.
- Thermal Management and avionics packaging Collaborate with electrical engineers to define component placement, thermal management, cable routing, and access panels. Balance CG, serviceability and EMI considerations.
- DFM iteration: Refine airframe manufacturing methods for manufacturing at scale. Reduce part count, define tolerances, and work with contract manufacturers.
- Charging Pad Mechanisms: Own the mechanical design of electromechanical systems both on the pad and on the airframe to ensure reliable alignment and capture.
Required Skills & Qualifications
- CAD: Mastery of SolidWorks/Onshape for assembly design
- Analysis & Simulation: Proficiency in FEA and Modal Analysis
- Design for Manufacturing (DFM): Experience optimizing designs for composite layups
- Reliability Engineering: A track record of designing test fixtures and performing reliability testing for electromechanical systems
About Voltair
We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.