Senior Optomechanical Engineer

Required

• 10+ years of optomechanical engineering experience, with optical assemblies you designed that shipped and held up in the field, ideally in harsh environments.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in kinematic and exact-constraint mounting. You can explain where every degree of freedom in your mounts goes, and you have designed flexures, three-point and semi-kinematic mounts, bonded cells, and retaining-ring mounts. We will ask you to walk us through mounts you designed and what went wrong with them.
• Strong materials judgment for thermal stability versus cost: CTE matching, athermalization of focus and boresight, adhesives and bond line design, and the real cost and lead-time differences between aluminum, stainless, titanium, Invar, and composites.
• Practical shock and vibration experience: modal analysis, random vibration and shock response, isolation, preload design, and the test methods to verify them (MIL-STD-810 or equivalent). You know the difference between a mount that passes the shaker and a mount that holds boresight after it.
• Experience designing and building sealed optical housings: O-ring and gasket design, dry nitrogen purge, desiccants, pressure equalization, window selection and mounting, and contamination control during assembly.
• Fluency with optical tolerance and error budgets. You can read a lens prescription and drawing, understand which tolerances matter, and translate image-quality and boresight requirements into mechanical requirements.
• Proficiency in FEA (modal, structural, thermal) and the judgment to know when the model is wrong.
• Strong GD&T and drawing skills. Your drawings fully define an optical assembly and suppliers can build to them.
• Hands-on alignment and test skills: autocollimators, collimators, alignment telescopes, interferometry or MTF benches, and building your own fixtures when the right one does not exist.
• A bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, optical engineering, or physics, or equivalent experience.
• Efficient, low-ego, and easy to work with. You say no clearly when a design will not survive, and you move work forward without drama.
• Experience with weapon-mounted or gun-fire-exposed optics: fire control sensors, weapon sights, remote weapon stations, or gimbaled EO/IR turrets.