Mechanical Engineer, Senior

The modern battlefield has changed. Cheap, autonomous suicide drones have turned the tactical advantage upside down, and the world is looking for a solution. At 9 Mothers, we aren’t just "innovating"—we are building the shield.

Backed by top-tier investors, we develop AI powered machines designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real-time. Our flagship product is a low-power, counter-drone system built for the edge—on vehicles, at bases, or in a soldier's pack.

While others build for "awareness" or "long-term research," we build for the immediate survival of those in harm’s way. We are a team of hackers, engineers, and mission-driven builders who value field-ready capability over polished slide decks. If you want to see your code or hardware in the field next month—not next year—this is your playground.

We are hiring a Senior Mechanical Engineer who specializes in mechanisms. Everything we build is a machine that has to move fast, hit hard, and keep working: belt-fed and high capacity shotgun actions, feed systems, gimbals, drive trains, and the gearboxes and linkages that tie them together. This role exists because the hardest problems we have are problems of motion, and we need one more person whose talent is seeing how parts move and interact before the parts exist.

This is not a product-owner role and it is not tied to one product. You will go wherever the hardest mechanical problem in the building is that month: a feed path that hangs up under one particular loading, a gear train that is louder than it should be, a latch that has to work at temperature after ten thousand cycles. You will work alongside our existing mechanical engineering team and you will be the person the team brings the ugly kinematics to.

The person we want has a well developed intuition for the ways objects can be made to move, and an equally well developed intuition for the ways objects object to being moved: friction, backlash, inertia, compliance, wear, thermal growth, contamination, and the tolerances that are fine on paper and not fine on a Tuesday afternoon in the dirt. We want clever solutions to complex mechanical problems, and we want the life experience to know when a clever solution is a bad idea. We want the person who hears that something is not quite right in a gearbox before anyone else in the room knows anything is wrong.

This is a hands-on role. You will build your own prototypes, run them on the bench and at the range, take them apart when they break, and figure out why. If your idea of a good weekend involves tearing down and rebuilding a machine to understand it, you will fit in here.

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1. Initial screen with recruiter (30 min phone call)

2. Virtual interview with Director of HW Ops (45 min via MS Teams)

3. Take-home assignment

4. Onsite interview in Austin

5. Reference checks & offer