Operational Performance Engineer, Mass Properties and Vehicle Performance

About the role

Mach Industries is a rapidly growing defense technology company focused on developing next-generation autonomous defense platforms. The company operates with startup agility and ambition, aiming to redefine the future of warfare through cutting-edge manufacturing, innovation at speed, and unwavering focus on national security.

Key Responsibilities

• Own vehicle mass properties, including mass, center of gravity, and moments and products of inertia, across configurations and mission states for all supported programs.
• Own the vehicle mass fraction and CG envelope, ensuring mass properties satisfy vehicle-level requirements.
• Own moment of inertia tracking against Level 1 vehicle requirements for pitch, yaw, and roll.
• Assign, manage, and enforce subsystem and team-level mass budgets in coordination with configuration management and integration teams.
• Deliver weekly CG status and mass-versus-budget reporting by subsystem and team.
• Deliver weekly mass trend analysis, identifying which groups are trending heavy, the rate of growth, and the risk to vehicle closure.
• Support engineering trades as they pertain to weight impact, providing mass property data and analysis to inform design decisions.
• Own analytical-versus-actual weight reconciliation by obtaining actual part weights, evaluating the impact on the vehicle, and assessing readiness before build and flight.
• Maintain vehicle and subsystem performance baselines, budgets, margins, and assumptions across aerodynamics, propulsion, power, range, endurance, and payload from early design through flight test.
• Assess how design decisions and configuration changes affect vehicle-level performance across all domains.
• Reconcile predictions with discipline analyses, CAD, as-built hardware, and ground and flight test data.
• Automate performance tracking and reporting, partnering with MDAO engineers on shared tooling and data pipelines.
• Keep performance records traceable and reproducible, and communicate status, uncertainty, and findings to Vehicle Leads and engineering teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 2+ years of relevant experience in vehicle performance, mass properties, vehicle design, flight dynamics, systems engineering, or a related discipline.
• Dedicated mass properties experience, including weight tracking, CG and inertia accounting, or mass budget management, on at least one complex aerospace vehicle program.
• Experience with configuration-controlled mass property records and multi-team mass budget management.
• Experience assessing weight impact of design trades and configuration changes at the vehicle level.
• Strong understanding of vehicle performance and the interactions among mass properties, aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, power, and controls.
• Experience using Python, Julia, MATLAB, or a similar technical computing language for engineering analysis.
• Ability to organize inputs from multiple disciplines, spot inconsistencies, and explain what they mean at the vehicle level.
• Ability to communicate analyses with clear assumptions, limitations, and uncertainty.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as mass properties lead or weight engineer on a large or weight-critical vehicle program.
• Experience with electric, hybrid-electric, or other weight-critical aircraft where mass closure is a persistent design driver.
• Multi-program mass properties experience, covering vehicles at different maturity levels or size classes simultaneously.
• Experience with Siemens NX, CATIA, or similar CAD/PLM tools for mass property extraction and validation.
• Experience maintaining performance baselines, technical budgets, margins, or configuration-controlled engineering data beyond mass properties.
• Experience with aircraft, UAS, missiles, rockets, or other aerospace vehicles.
• Experience building automated analysis, dashboards, or reporting workflows for mass properties or vehicle performance.
• Familiarity with conceptual design, vehicle sizing, flight dynamics, or multidisciplinary vehicle analysis.
• Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.