Join the team
Status: Open for applications
Product Design & CAD Engineer
- Location | Remote + London Office, United Kingdom
- Summary | Lead the mechanical design and development of Arribada’s products, specialist enclosures and telemetry tags
- Contract Type | Full-time, fixed term contract
- Remittance | £36 – £45k
- Start Date | As soon as possible
About this position
You’ll play a key role in Arribada’s engineering team, helping to design and develop products, devices and enclosures together with our embedded hardware and software engineers to help monitor and conserve endangered species and the environment.
About our organisation
Arribada co-develops open, customisable and impact-driven conservation technologies for the world’s leading environmental organizations. Our mission is to drive down costs and scale up access to the technologies, tools and solutions we need to solve conservation challenges, together.
We are based in the United Kingdom, operating from our London and Portsmouth offices, but conduct field work across the globe. Our development portfolio includes open source, low-cost satellite transmitters for sea turtles, timelapse cameras to monitor penguin populations in Antarctica and bycatch monitoring technologies to support UK fisheries.
Our clients include the National Geographic Society (NGS), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
We also invest a percentage of our annual proceeds to fund and run our award winning after-school conservation technology programme, Club Arribada, operating in Principe and Cape Verde with the help of our partners.
Your Role
Your role will be to lead on mechanical design and development of Arribada’s conservation technology products, devices and telemetry tags. You’ll work within CAD to first develop conceptual designs before presenting your ideas to the wider engineering team who will support you in the design and development of internal electronics and components to form products and enclosures able to survive in harsh environments, or customised for bespoke needs.
Because we develop customised solutions, every day will be different. You may find yourself designing an attachment mechanism to attach tags to manta rays via suction one week, and the next designing an IP68 enclosure to house a thermal camera that must survive in the extreme cold.
(Above) You’ll be free to experiment with 3D printing, CNC and epoxy resin casting to develop solutions fit for purpose, such as ultra lightweight tags for attachment to animals or enclosures to protect electronics from salt water ingress. You will also work with our technical team to explore different mechanical designs to develop devices that can survive at great pressure in the oceans (think 2000m down) or custom tasks, such as dropping off animal collars using timed releases.
Who we’re looking for
The ideal candidate will be a proactive team player who is keen to take ownership of projects yet willing to work collaboratively with Arribada’s experienced and passionate team of field conservationists and engineers.
If you’ve always wanted to help conserve wildlife and would like to experience working with some of the world’s leading conservation organisations to co-develop solutions and help to monitor and protect some of the world’s most threatened species, then this is your opportunity to use your coding experience to make a real difference.
Essential Experience
- Experience designing and developing physical products
- Experience working with modern CAD software packages (Solidworks, FreeCAD, Maya etc)
- Experience designing for manufacturing at scale
- A good understanding of electronic hardware design, connectors and water ingress techniques for harsh environments (IP68/69).
- Proficent knowlege of 3D printing and available processes (i.e SLS / resin printing) to form enclosures and custom parts
- Experience working with CNC machines and an understanding of CNC machining principles
Qualifications & Experience
- 2-3 years experience in product design / CAD design or a similar role, including development of physical products
- Experience working in a client facing engineering environment
Nice to have
- Experience developing products for extreme environments, i.e IP68 enclosure designs or devices for the use in the marine environment
- Experience working with epoxy resin encapsulation to pot electronics and form enclosures
- Past experience developing conservation technologies
Position Details
This is a full-time position. The work location is hybrid with 4 remote days a week and 1 day at our office in London with the wider Arribada team. The office day can be flexible to accommodate your needs. You will report to the Arribada Project Manager and Chief Technical Officer; you will not be managing staff. If necessary, we will consider a fully remote position based within UTC +/- 3 for highly experienced applicants.
Time: Full-time, 37.5 hrs/wk
Location: Remote-based with one day per week in London office
Duration: 24 month Fixed Term Contract with opportunity to extend.
Paid holidays: 26 days/yr (based on UK government holiday calculator) in addition to bank and public holidays
Benefits
- £36k – £45k per year based on experience
- Hybrid working
- Paid travel to Arribada’s field conservation project sites
- Pension scheme
How to Apply
If you’d like to express an interest in this position, please send a copy of your CV / Resume to hello@arribada.org
Alternatively, if you have any questions about this position, please do also get in touch using the same email address.
Our Projects
(Above) Rugged solar timelapse cameras to monitor Adelie penguin rookeries across the Antarctic Peninsular | Developed for Penguin Watch
(Above) An open source ARGOS satellite tag for EDGE avian species, such as the Shoebill Stork & the Philippine Eagle | Developed for the RSPB & the National Geographic Society (Photo Cameron Scott/Royal Ngala Safaris & Alain Pascua)
(Above) Our satellite tracked 500ml plastic water bottles can map and track the movement of ocean plastic polution across oceans. Live tracking
(Above) Wide angle, high resolution thermal cameras will provide an accurate means to counting individuals in large penguin colonies | Penguin Watch
(Above) Voice-assisted machine learning will enable Skippers working within UK fisheries to report bycatch events hands-free | Developed for Cefas
(Above) Our open source, low-cost, GPS and ARGOS satellite Horizon sea turtle tags enable researchers to scale up their monitoring programmes
(Above) Low-cost thermal technology coupled with embedded machine learning will detect the presence of polar bear, providing an early warning alert for communities | Developed for WWF Netherlands & Canada
(Above) Sea turtle GPS and satellite tags for rehabilitation centres will enable the tracking and long-term monitoring of injured or released turtles at very little cost | Developed with the Olive Ridley Project
(Above) Active suction technology provides an answer to attaching telemetry and behavioural tags to species such as oceanic manta rays in a non-invasive way | Developer for BOEM & Georgia Aquarium
Github
https://github.com/arribada
@arribada_i
hello@arribada.org
We’re all in this together
Arribada United Kingdom
To talk to our team in the UK / Europe (GMT), discuss volunteering with us, or for general conservation technology enquiries, feel free to mail us at hello@arribada.org or ask to join our Slack community channel.
Arribada USA
To talk to our team in the USA (EST), or for general conservation technology enquiries within the United States, feel free to mail us at hello-usa@arribada.org or ask to join our Slack community channel.