Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

Senior Mechanical Design Engineer
Location: Newmarket
Salary: Up to £65,000 DOE

KO2's client is seeking an exceptionally talented Senior Mechanical Design Engineer to join their elite engineering team in Newmarket. This is genuinely a rare opportunity to work on some of the most exciting and challenging mechanical engineering projects you'll encounter in your career. You'll find yourself at the forefront of designing and engineering novel automotive robot systems that are quite literally breaking boundaries in the safety arena.

The role will see you working directly alongside one of the most experienced mechanical engineers on the market, who will serve as an exceptional mentor. This is the kind of technical leadership and guidance that money quite frankly cannot buy, and it's the sort of opportunity that will genuinely accelerate your professional development in ways that most engineers only dream about.

You'll be responsible for leading the mechanical design function from initial concept right through to successful manufacture. This is not a narrow, specialist role; rather, you'll be involved in the complete engineering lifecycle. Your primary focus will be to create detailed 3D CAD models using SolidWorks, generating comprehensive technical drawings and system architectures that are both robust and thoroughly thought through. You'll be running sophisticated structural analysis and finite element analysis (FEA) to understand precisely how systems will perform under real world stresses, vibrations and environmental conditions.

Critically important to this role is your understanding of fabrication, steel construction, welding techniques and bolting strategies. The engineering here is substantial, chunky mechanical engineering, not the sort of lightweight polymeric work you might find elsewhere. You'll be selecting appropriate materials, evaluating manufacturing methods, and essentially ensuring that everything you design is not just technically sound but genuinely manufacturable by the teams on the shop floor.

There's also significant work to be done in terms of rework and redesign on the existing platform. We're looking to take several hundred hours out of the build process through intelligent engineering, which means improving efficiency, reducing production costs, and resolving manufacturing constraints. You'll be implementing change management protocols, issuing service bulletins, creating and maintaining comprehensive technical manuals, and ensuring absolutely everything meets the rigorous NATO compliance standards required for the end customer.

You'll have demonstrated, proven experience as a senior mechanical design engineer, with genuine competency in creating robust designs from initial concept through to successful manufacture. Your CAD skills will be exceptionally strong, particularly with SolidWorks, and you'll have a meticulous understanding of how to create assemblies, components and detailed manufacturing drawings that actually make sense on the shop floor.

You'll be comfortable applying engineering principles, undertaking calculations, specifying appropriate tolerances, and using FEA to validate your designs. Most importantly, you'll have genuine understanding of manufacturing processes. You won't just design in isolation; you'll understand how things are actually made, cut, welded, and finished. You'll be knowledgeable about metals and materials selection, and you'll be able to confidently discuss fabrication, machining, welding, and finishing techniques.

You need to be someone who approaches design challenges pragmatically, who evaluates problems logically and makes evidence based technical decisions. You should be the sort of engineer who takes genuine ownership of accuracy and engineering excellence.

You need to communicate complex engineering information clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. You should be someone who works effectively with colleagues and manufacturing teams. You'll need to be proactive, capable of working with appropriate autonomy and without requiring constant hand-holding. You'll demonstrate sound engineering judgement and professional credibility. We're looking for someone who is confident to make sound technical decisions and take ownership of outcomes.

This is quite genuinely a unique opportunity. The products being developed here are genuinely innovative and internationally significant. The engineering challenges are substantial and genuinely interesting. Your work will quite literally make a difference in the real world, deployed across numerous countries globally. If you're the sort of engineer who wants to do genuinely meaningful work on genuinely interesting problems, with genuinely good people, then this could be absolutely perfect for you.

If this role appeals to you and you believe you've got the technical capability and the right attitude to succeed in this environment, we'd very much like to hear from you. Please send your CV through to KO2 and we can have a proper discussion about whether this opportunity is genuinely right for you.