UAV Concept Engineer: Rapid Design & Trade Studies

Saab UK; East Hyde; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to push early-stage design. You will translate requirements and CONOPS into sized, analysable air vehicle concepts through rapid trade studies, iterating geometry, aerodynamics and propulsion.

You will close the loop between analysis and reality by integrating flight data, logs and telemetry to calibrate models and surrogates. You will build tools and automate workflows to keep the team fast and confident in its design decisions.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in aircraft sizing and concept-design tooling.
• Experience synthesising flight-test data to improve models.
• Proficient in constraint analysis, weight and mission/energy sizing, closing a design point.
• Hands-on experience with conceptual design tools such as OpenVSP, RCAIDE, AVL, XFLR5, Datcom.
• Strong Python scripting for automation and data processing.
• Understanding of full conceptual design loop: geometry, aerodynamics, weights, propulsion, mission, stability.

Responsibilities

• Perform aircraft conceptual sizing and constraint analysis to define feasible design points for new UAV concepts.
• Develop and morph parametric air vehicle geometry and Outer Mould Line through the analysis loop.
• Produce outputs: drag polars, lift curves, weight breakdowns, mission energy/endurance, stability margins.
• Run trade studies and design-space exploration to enable rapid evaluation of many designs.
• Synthesize flight-test and bench-test data to validate and improve models and sizing methods.
• Select and shape propulsion concepts and integrate into mission and energy analyses.
• Maintain and improve the concept-design toolchain and automation for rapid iteration.
• Capture design risks and feed into the programme risk register.

Skills

Aircraft sizing

Concept-design tooling

Flight-test data synthesis

Constraint analysis

Python scripting

Design-of-experiments

Aero design knowledge

Team collaboration

Tools

OpenVSP

RCAIDE

AVL

XFLR5

Datcom

PX4

Job description

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to push early-stage design. You will translate requirements and CONOPS into sized, analysable air vehicle concepts through rapid trade studies, iterating geometry, aerodynamics and propulsion.

You will close the loop between analysis and reality by integrating flight data, logs and telemetry to calibrate models and surrogates. You will build tools and automate workflows to keep the team fast and confident in its design decisions.