Job Description & Details
This role puts you right in the middle of advanced sensor development, where you will design and build rapid prototypes for complex optical and mechanical systems. You'll be working in tight-knit teams on fast-moving projects that actually push hardware from concept to testing. If you enjoy jumping between thermal analysis, structural design, and precision optics without getting bogged down in endless bureaucracy, this is a solid place to land.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will revolve around creating and revising production drawings, detail layouts, and complex assembly drawings for cutting-edge sensor hardware. You will spend a good chunk of your time turning rough sketches into production-ready designs while meticulously checking dimensions, material constraints, and how individual parts interface with the overall structure. Expect to collaborate heavily with other domain experts, reviewing blueprints, maintaining bills of materials, and occasionally stepping in to help coordinate performance testing on the hardware you build.
The Core Tech Stack
You need deep, hands-on fluency in major CAD packages like SolidWorks, CATIA, ProEngineer, or Siemens NX, paired with a rock-solid background in mechanisms and complex mechanical assemblies. Because this is heavily focused on sensor tech, having demonstrable experience designing opto-mechanical subsystems, EO/IR systems, and working with military standards (mil-spec components) is practically non-negotiable. You'll also need to speak comfortably about fabrication techniques like machining and sheet metal, along with fundamental thermal and structural analysis.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the engineering team, expect them to probe your grasp of tolerancing and thermal-structural interactions in precision assemblies; they want to know how your designs hold up under extreme real-world conditions. They will likely walk you through a hypothetical failure case in an opto-mechanical housing and ask you to troubleshoot the root cause on the fly, testing your intuition regarding material selection and thermal expansion.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to heavily front-load your experience with complex mechanical assemblies and opto-mechanical design rather than just listing basic drafting tasks. Make sure to explicitly include keywords straight from the job description like SolidWorks, EO/IR systems, thermal analysis, and mil-spec components to easily clear the ATS filters. Emphasize any past work involving rapid prototyping or short-cycle hardware development to show you can keep pace with their project timelines.