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Senior Opto-Mechanical Engineer

furientis

Los Angeles, CA

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About the role

America is critically deficient in production of defensive munitions- we currently produce shipborne interceptors in the few hundreds per year while our adversaries are producing offensive threats in the tens of thousands per year. Furientis was started to help solve this problem- introducing a new class of cost-effective, high production rate, interceptor missiles. We're seeking motivated individuals who internalize this problem and are eager to apply their past experience in similar industries (aerospace, defense, automotive/racing, robotics) and out of the box thinking to solve this problem for the US and its allies.

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 will work with the other seeker team engineers to develop the optical train for the seeker, from the initial design and lens prescription through a qualified, producible design. The optical train is a specified, tested component that must meet the mission requirements while operating beyond Mach 3, where it experiences aerothermal heating, vibration, and shock. You will contribute across that development effort: designing the lens elements and the opto-mechanical structure that supports them, building and aligning modules at the bench, and maintaining the error budget that accounts for optical performance. You answer to the Seeker Lead and work in tight partnership with the rest of the seeker team and the structures team. 

What You'll Do

  • Build and maintain 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 and beyond. 

  • Design the lens prescriptions in Zemax, and the opto-mechanics around them: mounts, baffles, windows and domes, FPA interface, and athermalization. Share detector thermal management with the Seeker Hardware Integration Engineer, where the thermal path runs through components that are not strictly optical. 

  • 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. 

  • Build the optical supply chain: qualify suppliers and maintain vendor relationships covering 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. 

  • 8 to 12 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; 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. 

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. 

  • A working vendor network across the IR optical supply chain. 

  • Daily use of agentic AI tools (Claude Code or similar) for tolerance scripting, supplier comparisons, and reporting. 

Eligibility & Logistics Location: On-site at our Los Angeles, CA HQ; remote work is not available. Monthly weekend travel for test events and supplier engagements. Clearance: A clearance is not required for this position. Must be a U.S. Person.

Equal Opportunity & Export Compliance Furientis is an equal-opportunity employer. To comply with U.S. export control laws, employment is contingent on eligibility to access export-controlled information.