Location:  Basildon, England

Our world leading client based in Basildon is currently looking for a Principal Mechanical Engineer. They are looking for motivated individuals to develop and grow into key members of their Mechanical Engineering Team. The successful candidates will be given the appropriate support and training needed to ensure they are ready and capable of leading all mechanical aspects of a project, across an array of cutting edge products, which include Opto-Mechanical assemblies, RF counter measures, Secure Comms, Counter-UAS and Electro-Optic Seekers. All of which are designed to meet the harshest of environments across Land, Sea and Air.
The candidates should be experienced in all aspects of the Mechanical Engineering lifecycle; they will be responsible for requirements capture, concept and detail design, as well as the transition into manufacture, verification and qualification.
All members of the Mechanical Engineering Team are encouraged to continually develop their technical skills within structural, thermal and model driven engineering aspects of Mechanical Engineering.

Key Responsibility Areas:
• Provide technical direction on critical business programmes to ensure delivery of mechanical engineering excellence.
• Delivery of compliant design solutions on-time and within budget.
• Actively engage with Procurement and Manufacturing during the introduction of new products into the Development/Production lifecycle phase.
• Provide key technical support to investigations and deliver effective solutions.
• Support and facilitate the review of mechanical designs in accordance with business and industry standards.
• Build effective cross functional relationships within local site, across business.
• Responsible for the quality of project deliverables output by supporting Mechanical Team members, and support mechanical management team in process and departmental improvement and development activities.

Skills, Qualifications & Knowledge
Essential:
• Technical or science degree qualified, or equivalent, with experience.
• Mechanical design and development using 3D CAD tools (ideally PTC Creo).
• Problem solving using a structured, logical approach to investigate issues and problems in an effective cross-functional manner.
• Experienced in Work Package Management – the adherence to cost and schedule milestones.
• Mechanical Engineering detailed design – extensive experience of engineering design, numerical calculations, tolerance studies, and the validation of.
• Proven success in designing for harsh environments, including EMC across Land, Sea and Air. Familiar with Mechanical Engineering for Electro-Optical and/or RF systems.
• Extensive knowledge of BS8888, GD&T and DFMA.
• Ability to communicate effectively with different Engineering disciplines both verbally and in written form, as well as skilled at delegating tasks to Engineers, providing the required level of support.

Desirable:
• MEng in Mechanical Engineering or chartered Engineer status.
• 'First pass' structural analysis to determine if a design is fit-for-purpose (ideally PTC Simulate or Siemens NX).
• Proficient in Thermal Analysis (ideally Ansys IcePak).
• Experience of Model Driven Engineering (Matlab, Simulink).
• Mechanical Engineering industry trends - knowledge of new and advancing tools, techniques and technologies (Additive Manufacturing, etc).

Personal Attributes:
• Confident in their subject and decisive with ideas and recommendations.
• Respectful of others with a high degree of personal integrity.
• Challenge ideas, proposed solutions and people in a constructive, positive manner.
• Effective decision maker who can effectively demonstrate empowerment and delegation.
• Ability to make effective trade-offs – cost, quality and schedule.

The role will involve working on UK classified programmes the candidate must therefore be willing and able to obtain a security clearance to SC.