Design Engineer — Purser Industries, Camberley. £45–60,000. On-site, five days.

Design Engineer — Purser Industries, Camberley. £45–60,000. On-site, five days.

Most design engineers spend more time waiting than designing. Draw a part. Wait for purchasing. Wait for suppliers. Wait for revisions. The CAD took a morning. The lead time takes six weeks.

Here it takes an afternoon.

Eleven paces

That's roughly the distance from your chair to the machine that makes the part. It's also the whole pitch, everything below is detail.

Draw a bracket in the morning. It's cut, welded, printed or laid up after lunch, bolted into an aircraft the next day, and flying by the end of the week. The fastest way to discover you're wrong is to cut the part, and once that's true, you design differently. You stop defending drawings and start making things.

Purser Industries builds military unmanned aircraft.

The threat-representative targets air-defence crews train against.

Designed, moulded, wired, tested and flown by the same team, in the same building, usually in the same month. We're moving into a 5,000 sq ft facility, doubling the workforce, and putting a CNC router, a mill, a welding bay and a printer farm on the floor.

We're building our own propulsion too. Electric flew. Petrol flew. Turbojets go into production next, and after that, ramjets, developed the old-fashioned way: build the engine, fly the engine, measure everything, build the next one.

What we don't have is you.

The work

You'll own the parts that make aircraft buildable, structure, engine and motor mounts, trays, brackets, hatch retention and the jigs, fixtures and tooling that let a growing team build the same thing sixty times without an argument. Increasingly, the propulsion hardware too: mounts, test rigs, fuel systems, fabricated assemblies that have to survive heat and vibration.

You'll make them, not just draw them. CNC router and mill, TIG, printers, composite tooling and layup — you'll be across all of it, often with resin on your hands or a torch in them. We don't have a prototyping department; we have a workshop, and we'd like you to be properly dangerous in it.

One principle runs through everything: your parts get built by people who joined last month. Design for the processes in this building and the hands that are actually here. A part that needs a craftsman doesn't scale, however good it looks — and you'll find out within a day, from someone holding it.

Then the unglamorous half: drawings a machinist doesn't need to ring you about, revisions that mean something, BOMs that are true. Twenty people are about to build to your paperwork.

What you bring

CAD should be muscle memory. The interesting part is judgement — knowing when ±0.02 mm genuinely matters, and when it just makes everyone's life harder and the part three weeks later.

You've made things rather than specified them. Metal, plastic, composite. TIG in aluminium and stainless is a serious advantage here, because a good deal of what's coming is welded. Your own tools are a good sign. A burn or two is a better one.

You can look at a part and see where the load goes, what it should be made of, and roughly what it'll weigh, and you know the difference between a design that needs another day of analysis and one that needs cutting out and breaking.

Speed. Iterations in hours. Precision where it earns its keep: a beautifully finished part that arrives after the flight test is an expensive paperweight.

Terms

On-site, five days. You can't prototype through a laptop lid, and every good decision here gets made standing next to the thing being decided.

Salary's in the title. We don't discuss money twice.

How the interview works

No competency framework, no five-year-plan question. We'll give you a real part, the real constraints, and a couple of hours at a bench. What comes back is the interview and we pay for your time.

The rest is simple

A year from now there'll be a shelf in this workshop, and most of what's on it will exist because you drew it and then went and made it. Some of it will be an engine.

Bring a portfolio if you like. We'd rather you brought the parts.