UAV Concept Engineer: Shape Next-Gen Air Vehicles

Saab; Dunstable; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days annual leave

Workplace pension scheme 8%

Private medical insurance

Group income protection

Death in service insurance

Up to 5% share matching

Enhanced parental leave

Job summary

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to strengthen early-stage design, where you translate requirements into sized, analysable air vehicle concepts. You will rapidly iterate geometry, aerodynamics, weights and propulsion, closing the loop with real flight data to ground designs in evidence.

You will work within a multidisciplinary team, developing tools to speed iteration, perform trade studies, and communicate risk and assumptions clearly, in a defence-enabled environment.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on experience in aircraft sizing and concept-design tooling.
• Experience synthesising flight-test data to improve models and sizing.
• Strong scripting in Python for automation and tool development.
• Familiarity with full conceptual design loop and propulsion integration.

Responsibilities

• Perform aircraft conceptual sizing and constraint analysis to define feasible UAV design points.
• Develop parametric air vehicle geometry and drive it through the analysis loop.
• Produce conceptual outputs: drag polars, lift curves, weight breakdowns, energy/endurance.
• Run design-space exploration and trade studies to enable rapid iteration.
• Synthesize flight-test and bench-test data to validate and improve models.
• Select and shape propulsion concepts and integrate them into analyses.
• Maintain and enhance the concept-design toolchain and automation.
• Document design risk and feed into risk registers.

Skills

Aircraft sizing

Concept-design tooling

Flight-test data synthesis

Python scripting

Design-of-experiments

Aero/propulsion integration

Stability & control

Team collaboration

Tools

OpenVSP

RCAIDE

AVL

XFLR5

Datcom

PX4 / ArduPilot

SITL/HITL

CAD

Job description

Saab UK is seeking a UAV Concept Engineer to strengthen early-stage design, where you translate requirements into sized, analysable air vehicle concepts. You will rapidly iterate geometry, aerodynamics, weights and propulsion, closing the loop with real flight data to ground designs in evidence.

You will work within a multidisciplinary team, developing tools to speed iteration, perform trade studies, and communicate risk and assumptions clearly, in a defence-enabled environment.