Mechanical Design EngineerArdent

About this Role

Wanted: a mechanical designer who can turn insufficient data and specs into solid, reliable, and manufacturable designs.  This is a design-heavy role for someone who has engineered mechanical parts and assemblies for various vehicles, robotics applications, and has taken projects to production. You should understand manufacturing, integration, and real-world operating conditions well enough to work with our airframe, propulsion, systems, and fabrication teams on choices that determine whether a design can be built, installed, and maintained reliably.

What you will do

• Own the mechanical design of components, mechanisms, and assemblies from concept through detailed design, analysis, and release to fabrication or procurement.

• Integrate actuators, linkages, hinges, latches, and mounting hardware, into the airframe to meet load, motion, weight, thermal, and reliability requirements.

• Create detailed CAD models, drawings, and design documentation; define tolerances, materials, finishes, and interfaces so parts fit, function, and can be assembled and serviced.

• Create 2D drawings that clearly communicate the design intent to the fabrication team.

• Perform or support mechanical analysis (stress, vibration, kinematics, thermal, and fatigue life) and use results to improve designs.

• Support prototype builds, fit checks, and testing; incorporate hardware feedback and lessons learned into the next revision quickly.  Must enjoy getting your hands dirty and building things.

What you bring

• 5+ years of experience designing mechanical systems for vehicles, robotics, or electro-mechanical products, including mechanisms, structural parts, and integrated assemblies.

• Proven ability to carry designs from concept or CAD through finished, working hardware, with a clear understanding of tolerances, fit, materials, and manufacturing processes.

• Strong CAD proficiency (SolidWorks, CATIA, NX, or equivalent) and practical skill with design-for-manufacture, GD&T, and documentation practices that shops and suppliers can actually use.

• Ability to recognize a design that will be difficult to build, assemble, or maintain and stop it before it moves downstream. (The humility to take an “I told you so” from the fabrication team).

• Willingness to stay close to the hardware—reviewing builds, examining parts, and incorporating shop and test feedback into the next revision.

• Familiar with industry best practices for drawings, design reviews, document management

Useful experience

Experience with vehicle chassis or body structures, robotic manipulators or mobile platforms, electro-mechanical actuators and mechanisms, aerospace or automotive hardware, precision mechanisms, thermal management design, or taking designs from prototype into repeatable production. Familiarity with composites interfaces, lightweight materials, or aircraft systems is valuable but not required.  If you’re a builder/tinkerer AND can do math, we need you.

About Ardent

We are building the flying car. The next generation of great companies will deliver on the sci-fi promises of the mid-20th century, and personal aviation remains conspicuously unfinished. Aviation went from twelve seconds over the dunes at Kitty Hawk to supersonic flight in a single man’s lifetime. Then progress in personal aviation ground to a halt. Ardent is reconsidering the aircraft from first principles: distributed electric propulsion designed to accommodate inevitable failures, hydrocarbon energy for useful range, and relentless simplicity to make the product affordable. Electricity should move the aircraft. Fuel should carry the energy.

Our path begins with the simplest aircraft capable of proving that architecture, progresses through unmanned applications, and leads to a two-seat aircraft that people buy because they want to go somewhere. Each step must compound toward the same goal: a flying car that clearly wins against the car on meaningful trips. We will build, fly, break things, and let reality and rapidly developed test data be the final arbiter. The measure of success is miles flown that otherwise would have been driven—and, eventually, journeys that used to be impractical. The automobile radically expanded the geographic and economic radius of human life. Personal aviation will do it again.