Optomechanical Engineer

Location: Onsite — Austin, TX

Employment Type: Direct Hire, Full-Time

Job Title: Senior Optomechanical Engineer

About 9 Mothers

The modern battlefield has changed. Cheap, autonomous suicide drones have turned the tactical advantage upside down, and the world is looking for a solution. At 9 Mothers, we aren’t just "innovating"—we are building the shield.

Backed by top-tier investors, we develop AI powered machines designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real-time. Our flagship product is a low-power, counter-drone system built for the edge—on vehicles, at bases, or in a soldier's pack.

Why 9 Mothers?

While others build for "awareness" or "long-term research," we build for the immediate survival of those in harm’s way. We are a team of hackers, engineers, and mission-driven builders who value field-ready capability over polished slide decks. If you want to see your code or hardware in the field next month—not next year—this is your playground.

Position Summary

• We are hiring a Senior Optomechanical Engineer to own the optics-related subsystems on our robotic weapon platforms: the cameras, thermal imagers, rangefinders, and sensor heads that let our systems find and engage small drones, and the windows, housings, and mounts that keep them working. This role exists because our optics have to hold alignment and image quality on a machine that fires shotguns, slews hard, and lives outdoors in Texas heat, dust, and rain.

• This is not an optical design role. Our lens trains are designed by others, inside and outside the company. Your job is everything that happens to those optics once they leave the designer: how they are held, aligned, sealed, kept clean and dry, protected from shock and vibration, and made to perform the same at 0 °F as they do at 140 °F. You are the person who makes sure we get every bit of performance the optical designer put on paper, and you are the person who tells the designer early when a prescription will not survive the mount it needs.

• The person we want thinks in degrees of freedom. You know where an optic is constrained and where it is free to move, how much it will move with temperature and load, and what that does to focus, boresight, and MTF. You have strong opinions on bonded versus clamped versus flexure mounts, and the experience to back them. You know what Invar, titanium, and stainless buy you over aluminum, and you know when aluminum is the right answer because the error budget allows it and the price does not.