Senior Mechanical Design Engineer - Aero Structures

On-site | NV1 Cleared, or Australian Citizen with the ability to obtain NV1

Before anything else: this role requires Australian Citizenship and the ability to obtain and hold an NV1 security clearance.

Still here? Good.

Are you the kind of engineer who'd rather build it, test it, and learn from it than spend three days validating it in FEA first? Someone who reaches for a hand calc to get to a reliable answer in minutes, gets the design 80 to 90 percent right, and gets it made? If you're itching to get out of a big, slow prime and actually put hardware in the air, keep reading.

We're recruiting for a fast-moving Adelaide defence-aerospace manufacturer, scaling hard from prototype into full-rate production of uncrewed aerial systems. They design and build the whole thing in-house, in Australia. They need a hands-on Senior Mechanical Engineer with strong structural instincts to join a tight, busy engineering team.

The Role

This is a hands-on senior engineering role, not a management one. You won't have direct reports. You'll be one of the senior technical heads in the team - doing real mechanical and structural design yourself, and guiding the junior engineers and designers around you by example: where the stress concentrations are, how the bolting and fastening should look, where the weight can come out, what good practice looks like.

What you'll do:

- Hands-on mechanical and structural design of an airframe and system hardware.
- Hand-calc verification - classical, first-principles methods to reach a reliable 80 to 90 percent answer fast, with targeted FEA when the geometry earns it.
- Structural judgement in practice: failure-point minimisation, weight reduction, fastening and bolting, stress concentrations.
- Drawing and design review - guiding juniors and designers toward best practice without formally managing them.
- Working shoulder to shoulder with machinists,



fabricators and the assembly team to get hardware built and fixed on the spot.
- Getting designs out the door in a stretched, quick-paced environment where things move weekly, not quarterly.

You’ll thrive here if you:

- Have a genuine hand-calc-first mindset - you trust first-principles and engineering judgement to move fast, not exhaustive analysis.
- Are a doer. You jump in, get things built, and refine the details as you go, rather than needing everything perfect before you move.
- Bring strong practical structural and mechanical design ability - materials, fastening, load paths, weight, manufacturability.
- Are comfortable on the workshop floor, solving real fabrication and tolerance problems directly with the people building the hardware.
- Have a glass-half-full, lateral-thinking outlook - "how do we make this work" rather than "that won't work".
- Enjoy mentoring and lifting the engineers around you, informally and by example.
- Want to escape the pace and process of a big prime and actually build.

A fair warning:

this is a fast, slightly chaotic, build-test-iterate environment. If you're happiest when every detail is signed off before anything gets made, you'll find it frustrating - and we'd be doing us both a disservice. This role suits people who are energised by momentum and getting things done.

Nice to have:

- Hands-on prototyping, R&D;, or fabrication experience (3D printing, CNC, machining).
- Experience with SolidWorks (their CAD platform) — though strong engineers move between packages easily.
- A background that's involved real hardware getting built, tested and used.

The Environment

- On-site in Adelaide. Part office, part workshop and factory floor - expect hands-on work and PPE in designated areas.
- 9-day working fortnight - every second Friday off.
- Fast, ambitious and genuinely hands-on. Minimal bureaucracy, real ownership, and your work gets built and flown rather than filed on a server.

Australian Citizenship is mandatory. This role requires the ability to obtain and hold an NV1 security clearance.

📌 Senior Mechanical Engineer (Adelaide)
🏢 ProFound People
📍 Adelaide