Senior Mechanical Engineer
Carnation, Washington, United States
Il Marinen was created from the dissolution of the drones program at Vulcan Inc. with the goal of continuing Paul Allen's vision of creating low cost, high performance AI-enabled UAV swarms to combat poaching in Africa. At Il Marinen, I rejoined a team of my colleagues from my previous time at Vulcan.My responsibilities included the conception, functional requirements tracking, trade studies, design, prototyping, and final procurement of UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) components, which were manufactured via carbon fiber molding, a variety of additive manufacturing processes, and conventional machining. I was the chief designer behind the payload interface, airspeed sensor, and VTOL motor units on a new drone design.Upon the completion of hardware design and procurement, I led the mechanical assembly of our first engineering build and the five flight-capable airframes which followed that. I participated in flight and performance testing across multiple of these airframes, and designed and constructed ground support equipment for use by the Il Marinen operations team.Following hardware tests and airframe performance validation, my role consisted of design improvements following DFMA (design for manufacturing and assembly) principles, improved documentation, and creation of work instructions to enable production of our airframe at an increased scale.