Senior MDAO Engineer

About the role

Join Mach Industries to advance the design and analysis of next-generation autonomous defense platforms. This role focuses on developing and applying multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization (MDAO) methods for vehicle sizing, evaluation, and maturation. You will contribute to the core mission of delivering scalable defense systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Create and implement MDAO models, methods, and workflows for conceptual and preliminary vehicle design.
• Support vehicle sizing, configuration trades, mission analysis, and performance assessments across Mach's product line.
• Enhance analytical tools for evaluating vehicle concepts, covering aerodynamics, propulsion, mass properties, structures, controls, mission performance, and operational constraints.
• Collaborate with configuration, sizing, performance, test, and discipline engineering teams to ensure MDAO workflows meet design needs and produce relevant outputs.
• Integrate higher-fidelity analysis, ground test data, flight test data, and operational performance data to improve model accuracy and future design decisions.
• Conduct optimization studies, sensitivity analyses, and trade studies to identify key design drivers and communicate findings to engineering stakeholders.
• Help define assumptions, constraints, objectives, and metrics for vehicle-level design studies.
• Maintain effective analytical workflows using practical software development practices like version control, documentation, reproducibility, and basic testing.
• Mentor engineers using or contributing to MDAO workflows, focusing on modeling assumptions, trade study setup, and result interpretation.
• Contribute to the MDAO capability roadmap, balancing immediate design support with long-term model and workflow improvements.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of relevant aerospace engineering experience, or an advanced degree with significant experience in vehicle design, MDAO, sizing, configuration development, performance analysis, or computational design.
• Experience with sizing, configuration trades, mission analysis, or performance assessment for aircraft, UAS, missiles, spacecraft, or other aerospace vehicles.
• Broad understanding of how aerospace disciplines, including aerodynamics, propulsion, mass properties, structures, controls, and mission performance, influence vehicle design.
• Experience developing or modifying engineering analysis tools using Python, MATLAB, C++, Julia, or a similar language.
• Ability to set up and interpret trade studies, optimization studies, sensitivity analyses, or design-of-experiments.
• Strong engineering judgment and ability to clearly communicate assumptions, limitations, tradeoffs, and recommendations.
• Experience working in fast-paced, multidisciplinary engineering environments.

Nice to have

• Advanced degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.
• Experience with UAV, aircraft, missile, or defense product development.
• Experience in conceptual design, preliminary design, configuration/sizing, mission performance, or operational performance analysis.
• Experience incorporating test, flight, or operational data into engineering models.
• Experience with MDAO, optimization, surrogate modeling, uncertainty analysis, or multidisciplinary trade-space exploration.
• Experience with OpenMDAO, pyOptSparse, Dymos, GPkit, SUAVE, in-house MDAO frameworks, or similar tools.
• Experience helping define analytical workflows, model validation practices, or design study best practices.

Skills & tools

• Python
• MATLAB
• C++
• Julia
• OpenMDAO
• pyOptSparse
• Dymos
• GPkit
• SUAVE

Practical notes

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws and regulations. Any offer of employment may be conditioned on authorization to receive controlled software or technology without export license sponsorship. Mach participates in E-Verify. Salary offers are based on various factors including experience, education, skills, and business considerations, and typically include competitive equity grants as part of the total compensation package. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, and professional development opportunities.