UAV Concept Engineer: Rapid Sizing & Trade Studies

Blue Bear Systems Group Ltd; Oakley; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days annual leave

Workplace pension with 8% company

Private medical insurance

Group income protection

Death in service insurance

Share matching scheme

Enhanced parental leave

Job summary

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to strengthen our early-stage design capability. You will transform requirements into sized, analyzed air vehicle concepts through rapid trade studies and iterative design loops, connecting analysis to real flight data.

Join a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team and contribute to ideation, sizing, and validation using tools like OpenVSP and PX4/ArduPilot, while maintaining safety and performance in defence environments.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in aircraft sizing and conceptual design.
• Experience synthesising flight-test data to improve models.
• Familiarity with design tools and data-driven methods.
• Ability to work in safety-critical, defence environments.
• Experience with PX4/ArduPilot, SITL/HITL and autopilot logs.

Responsibilities

• Perform aircraft conceptual sizing and constraint analysis for UAV concepts.
• Develop and morph parametric air vehicle geometry through the analysis loop.
• Produce outputs: drag polars, lift curves, weight breakdowns, energy / endurance.
• Run design-space explorations and manage trade studies.
• Integrate flight-test data to validate and improve conceptual models.

Skills

Aircraft sizing

Concept design tooling

Flight-test data analysis

OpenVSP

RCAIDE

AVL

XFLR5

Python scripting

PX4 / ArduPilot

SITL/HITL

MAVLink / ULog

CAD/geometry handling

Tools

OpenVSP

RCAIDE

AVL

XFLR5

Datcom

Job description

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to strengthen our early-stage design capability. You will transform requirements into sized, analyzed air vehicle concepts through rapid trade studies and iterative design loops, connecting analysis to real flight data.

Join a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team and contribute to ideation, sizing, and validation using tools like OpenVSP and PX4/ArduPilot, while maintaining safety and performance in defence environments.