Senior Opto-Mechanical Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 19, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 25, 2026. Furientis scores A on the Alion truth index.
About the Team
The Seeker Team builds the eyes and the targeting logic of our weapon system: a low-cost, mass-producible, multimodal missile seeker that leans on commercial supply chains where they outperform the defense legacy, with supply-chain security engineered in from day one. On a modern missile, the seeker is 40 to 60% of unit cost and often drives overly long delivery cycles; accordingly, the seeker team is at the tip of the spear for delivering value to our customers and to the taxpayer.
Seeker design has exactly two real constraints: physics and mission. Supply chain, vendor lead time, qualification cost, "the way it's always been done": none of that stops us. We are a small, deeply technical team that drives capability through ingenuity and bias for action and ships hardware that flies. This is a wear-many-hats environment where you must be comfortable "building the airplane in flight" and stepping well outside your comfort zone; a narrowly scoped role with clean handoffs is not what this team offers.
This is an AI-native team. Through fluent use of cutting-edge agentic coding tools, one engineer here consistently out-delivers a much larger conventional team. You will have opinions about where these tools help and where they do not, provide governance input, and build AI into your workflow from day one.
About the Role
You own the performance of the seeker's optical train, from the first prescription to every fielded round. A perfect optical system images a point as a point; your job is to hold the seeker as close to that as physics allows in excess of Mach 3 aerothermal loads, vibration, and shock, and to prove it with an error budget that closes. You design the optical train, prescription included, you build and align it with your own hands, and you deliver it as a specified, tested component. Wherever optical performance is in question, you lead. You report to the seeker lead and work in tight partnership with the perception hardware integration engineer: you own how well the seeker sees; they own the seeker as a working system.
What You'll Do
- •Own the optical error budget end to end, from prescription through fielded units, including the aero-optical path: dome heating, in-band self-emission, and wavefront error at Mach 3 speeds.
- Design the lens prescriptions in Zemax or Code V, and the opto-mechanics around them: mounts, baffles, windows and domes, FPA interface, athermalization, and detector thermal management.
- Build, align, and test optical modules at the bench, and author the acceptance spec every delivered module is tested against.
- Define detector requirements from the sensitivity budget and partner on the selection trade.
- Own module-level environmental qualification and the design response when optical hardware fails qual.
- Own the optical supply chain: supplier qualification and vendor relationships for optical surfaces, their mounts, and optical test equipment.
•Hold sign-off on every interface that touches the optical column.
Skills We're Hiring For
- B.S. in Optical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, or related; M.S. preferred.
- 10+ years of hands-on IR or precision optical hardware design and integration, from CAD through environmental qualification.
- Wave and geometric optics from first principles, with Seidel/Zernike fluency; able to diagnose an aberrated system at the bench.
- Design-level Zemax or Code V; stray-light analysis with FRED, ASAP, or TracePro.
- Athermal design, error-budget construction, tolerance analysis, and bonded/elastomeric optical mounting for IR systems.
- Hands-on optical metrology: interferometry, MTF, boresight, transmission, stray light.
- MWIR and/or LWIR phenomenology sufficient to defend seeker performance claims.
- A working vendor network across the IR optical supply chain.
Bonus Points For
- LWIR (8 to 14 µm) optical assemblies in a tactical or airborne product.
- High-g optical assembly experience.
- Production transition of an optical assembly from prototype to volume.
- Direct missile, munition, or seeker program experience.