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9 Mothers is a venture-backed defense technology company building AI-powered counter-drone systems designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real-time. The company's flagship product is a low-power system built for deployment on vehicles, at bases, or in a soldier's pack.
You will join as the Manufacturing Engineering Lead—the first hire dedicated to manufacturing as the company transitions its robotic turret product from engineering-built prototypes to repeatable, scalable production. This is a ground-floor role with significant scope: you will define the manufacturing organization from the ground up, establish foundational processes, and grow into leading the production function as volume ramps.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define manufacturing strategy: conduct make/buy analysis, decide what is built in-house in Austin versus sourced from suppliers and contract manufacturers, and roadmap how that split evolves with volume growth.
- Build early production units yourself and author the first manufacturing instructions, travelers, fixtures, and process documentation that the production line will inherit.
- Stand up the production process: establish routings, assembly and test stations, tooling, and material flow. Design for scalability from day one.
- Drive design for manufacturability (DFM/DFA) by partnering with mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineering while designs are still fluid.
- Qualify and manage suppliers: select machine shops, fabricators, and contract manufacturers; own first-article inspection, corrective action, and supplier relationships.
- Establish quality foundations: build right-sized quality practices including incoming inspection, in-process checks, end-of-line test, nonconformance tracking, and unit-level serialization appropriate to NFA-regulated manufacturing.
- Own BOM discipline and manufacturing data: maintain clean BOMs, revisions, and as-built records; shape MRP/ERP tooling and integration with engineering's PDM process.
- Plan and execute pilot and low-rate initial production runs; translate learnings into process improvements.
- Model and drive unit cost at current and future volumes; identify cost drivers and prioritize engineering and sourcing work.
- Shape the future manufacturing organization by defining roles needed as volume scales (technicians, quality, supply chain, manufacturing engineers).
This role is hands-on from day one: you will write manufacturing instructions from builds you perform yourself, bolt by bolt. The company values field-ready capability and rapid deployment; the expectation is that your work will see the field within months, not years.
**Requirements:**
- 10+ years of manufacturing engineering or operations experience on hardware products that shipped, ideally robotics or complex electromechanical systems.
- Demonstrated experience taking a product from prototype to production; ability to walk through the transition concretely: initial state, process built, make/buy decisions, what failed, and your personal ownership.
- Fluency in hardware production tools and methods: DFM/DFA, PFMEA, process capability, tolerance analysis, fixture and tooling design, work instructions, line layout and flow.
- Practical quality-system experience: ability to build inspection, test, and corrective-action processes that fit a small company today and mature into a formal QMS.
- Supplier and contract-manufacturer management experience: sourcing, qualification, first-article inspection, and maintaining partner relationships while holding to specification.
- Comfort being the entire manufacturing function initially—hands-on at the bench and on the floor—while designing processes that scale beyond a single person.
- Efficient, low-ego, collaborative approach; ability to build rapport quickly and move work forward without friction.
**Nice-to-Have:**
- Experience standing up manufacturing in a venture-backed hardware startup.
- Familiarity with firearms manufacturing or other regulated production environments (defense, aerospace, medical).
- Working knowledge of ISO 9001 / AS9100 and incremental path to compliance.
- Experience implementing or administering MRP/ERP systems at a small company.
- Experience in ITAR-regulated manufacturing and export-controlled data handling.
