Drone Aerodynamics Engineer

About the role

You will join a drone startup where aerodynamic efficiency directly sets endurance, speed, and payload: every drag count you remove is flight time the customer gets. You analyze airframes, rotors, and propellers with CFD and wind tunnel testing, then validate predictions in flight. Your models shape the outer mold lines of every aircraft the company builds, and your judgment determines how much the team trusts simulation versus test. You will maintain the company's aerodynamic simulation toolchain, validating mesh strategies and turbulence models against test data, and you will mentor designers on aerodynamic fundamentals so drag reduction becomes a daily habit rather than a review-time surprise. You will also build the flight-test correlation database that tracks CFD predictions against measured performance, steadily improving the team's simulation accuracy over time.

What you will achieve

• Deliver aerodynamic designs and analyses that measurably improve endurance or cruise efficiency versus baseline configurations on real aircraft.
• Validate CFD predictions with wind tunnel and flight test data, closing the loop between simulation and reality with quantified error bands.
• Reduce development risk by identifying aerodynamic issues such as separation, interference drag, and propeller-wing interaction early in the design cycle.
• Optimize propeller and rotor designs for the mission profile, balancing efficiency, noise, and structural constraints in one coherent solution.
• Produce aerodynamic databases that the flight controls team uses for simulation, envelope protection, and handling qualities work.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2-5 years of experience in applied aerodynamics for UAVs, rotorcraft, or light aircraft with hardware that flew.
• Proficiency with CFD tools such as ANSYS Fluent or OpenFOAM, including meshing strategy, turbulence modeling, and result validation.
• Strong fundamentals: low-Reynolds-number aerodynamics, rotor and propeller theory, and drag decomposition.
• Experience planning and executing wind tunnel tests, including model design, instrumentation selection, and data reduction.
• Ability to correlate simulation with flight test data and explain discrepancies honestly and quantitatively.
• Proficiency in Python or MATLAB for analysis scripting and large dataset processing.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in aerospace engineering.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with transition VTOL aerodynamics or ducted fan analysis.
• Background in aeroacoustics for propeller noise prediction and reduction.
• Familiarity with optimization methods such as adjoint or design-of-experiments applied to aerodynamic shape design.
• Experience with stability and control derivative extraction for flight dynamics models.