We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.

As a Mechanical Engineer at Voltair, you will work on the structure and mechanics that allow our drones to land on 500kV power lines. We are seeking an engineer to build our "exoskeleton".

Key Responsibilities

• EMI Shielding & Structure: Design and machine aluminum chassis components that serve a dual purpose: a robust airframe and a Faraday cage to shield sensitive avionics from 20kV/m electric fields.
• Structural Dynamics: Integrate aluminum shielding with carbon fiber components and perform rigorous resonant (modal) analysis to ensure flight stability and vibration dampening.
• Mechanism Design: Contribute to the development of our clamping mechanism, enabling reliable perching and recharging on power lines under varying environmental conditions.
• Validation & Safety: Execute destructive testing protocols, including impact analysis and high-voltage exposure (1M+ volts), to quantify failure modes and ensure battery safety during crash scenarios.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• CAD Expertise: Mastery of SolidWorks/Onshape for assembly design
• Analysis & Simulation: Proficiency in FEA and Modal Analysis to predict structural behavior under high vibration and stress.
• Design for Manufacturing (DFM): Experience optimizing designs for CNC machining.
• Reliability Engineering: A track record of designing test fixtures and performing reliability testing for electromechanical systems.

Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers.

Our Hardest Challenges

• Performant recharging on distribution lines
• Drone weather hardening & reliability
• Tele-operations & autonomy
• Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem
• Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge