Composites R&D Engineer

About Alteon

The Wright Brothers gave humanity flight, Alteon exists to give humanity (almost) perpetual flight. Our mission is to build the world’s highest endurance aircrafts – ones that can fly for up to ~417 days at a time.

We are a small, young team driven by pushing the limits of what’s possible – we don’t like settling for good enough. We are here to build the best technology possible, the best airplane possible, to do the best engineering possible. Limited only by the laws of physics.

About this role

As a composites R&D engineer at Alteon, you will be a part of the team that designs and develops the composite structures that go into the aircraft – that need to survive 100s of days in the air without ever landing, without any maintenance. You’ll spend your days asking what we could be doing better – better layups, better materials, better processes – and then going and proving it out. This is the role for you if you enjoy getting your hands dirty and doing layups yourself, you are bothered by imperfect parts, and have a first-principles understanding of how composites work.

What you’ll do

• Design and run experiments to validate new materials, processes, and technique trials – and figure out which ones are worth bringing into production.
• Work closely with production to take a part from a one-off layup on the bench to something that gets built consistently, week after week.
• Design new tooling, fixtures, and jigs to improve quality and repeatability.
• Collaborate with flight test and production to understand how parts are performing in the air, and feed that back into identifying and fixing problems.

Competencies & skills

• You have built and iterated on composite parts for airplanes, automotive or anything else that had to work in the real world.
• You are proficient in CAD (Fusion 360 / Solidworks / etc) to be able to design your own tooling.
• You have a working knowledge of design for manufacturing and GD&T.
• You are familiar with composite manufacturing techniques across the board from wet layups to prepreg to resin infusion and more.