Manufacturing Engineering Lead

About this role

Location: Onsite — Austin, TX

Employment Type: Direct Hire, Full-Time

Job Title: Manufacturing Engineering Lead

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 Manufacturing Engineering Lead as our first hire focused on manufacturing rather than R&D. Our robotic turret product is moving from engineering-built units toward repeatable production, and we need someone to plant the seeds of our manufacturing process with a clear eye on how that process will scale.

This is a ground-floor role. Today there is no manufacturing organization; you will define its foundations. That starts with the manufacturing strategy itself: what we build in-house in Austin, what we place with contract manufacturers and suppliers, and how that split evolves as volume grows. The processes, documentation, quality practices, and supplier relationships you establish in year one are what the production org will be built on, and for the right person there is real potential to grow into leading that organization as it takes shape.

This is also a hands-on role in the most literal sense. The first manufacturing instructions will be written by you, from builds you perform yourself, bolt by bolt. We are looking for someone who has done this before: someone who has taken hardware from prototype into production at least once and can describe concretely what that transition looked like, the role they personally played in it, and what they would do differently this time.

Essential Duties

- Define the manufacturing strategy. Own the make/buy analysis for the product. Decide what we build and assemble in-house versus what we source from suppliers and contract manufacturers and build the roadmap for how those split changes with volume.

- Build early units yourself and write the first MIs. Turn the bolts with your own hands-on early builds, and capture what you learn as the manufacturing instructions, travelers, fixtures, and process documentation the production line will inherit.

- Stand up the production process. Establish routings, assembly and test stations, tooling and fixtures, and the flow of material through the building. Start lean, but structure it so it scales instead of being thrown away at 10x volume.

- Drive design for manufacturability. Partner with mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineering while designs are still fluid. Push DFM/DFA, tolerance and process-capability thinking, and part-count reduction into the product before it hardens.

- Qualify and manage suppliers. Select machine shops, fabricators, and contract manufacturers. Own first-article inspection, supplier corrective action, and the working relationships that keep parts arriving on spec and on time.

- Lay the quality foundation. Build right-sized quality practices from scratch: incoming inspection, in-process checks, end-of-line test, nonconformance and corrective action, and unit-level serialization and traceability appropriate to NFA-regulated manufacturing.

- Own build data and BOM discipline. Keep manufacturing BOMs, revisions, and as-built records clean and trustworthy. Stand up or shape the MRP/ERP tooling we grow into, working with engineering’s PDM release process.

- Run pilot and low-rate builds. Plan and execute engineering builds, pilot runs, and low-rate initial production on the floor, and turn what those builds teach us into process improvements.

- Understand and drive unit cost. Model costs at current and future volumes, identify the drivers, and prioritize the engineering and sourcing work that bends the curve.

- Shape the future manufacturing org. Help define the roles manufacturing will need as volume ramps: technicians, quality, supply chain, manufacturing engineers.

Requirements

- 10+ years of manufacturing engineering / operations experience on hardware products that shipped, ideally robotics or complex electromechanical systems.

- You have taken a product from prototype to production before and can walk us through it: the state it started in, the process you built, the make/buy calls you made, what broke, and what you personally owned. This conversation is the core of our interview.

- Fluency in the tools and methods of hardware production: DFM/DFA, PFMEA, process capability, tolerance analysis, fixture and tooling design, work instructions, line layout and flow.

- Practical quality-system experience. You know how to build inspection, test, and corrective-action processes that fit a small company today and mature into a real QMS later.

- Supplier and contract-manufacturer management experience: sourcing, qualification, FAI, and holding partners to spec without burning the relationship.

- Comfortable being the entire manufacturing function on day one, wrench in hand at the bench and on the floor, while designing processes that will outlast the days when you are the only one running them.

- Efficient, low-ego, and easy to work with. You build rapport quickly and move work forward without drama.

Nice-to-Have

- Experience standing up manufacturing in a venture-backed hardware startup.

- Familiarity with firearms…