What are the responsibilities and job description for the Lead Turbomachinery Engineer position at Drove Aeropower?
As a trusted talent partner, Infotel is working with Drove Aeropower to build a world-class team. We are looking for outstanding candidates who are eager to contribute to a dynamic and growing organization.
About Drove Aeropower
Drove Aeropower builds advanced gas turbine systems for some of the most demanding applications in energy and defense, built around high power density, rapid deployment, and domestic manufacturing. We move with the speed and ownership of a startup while tackling engineering problems normally reserved for much larger organizations.
Own the rotating hardware at the heart of the machine.
We're looking for a Lead Turbomachinery Engineer to own the design, manufacture, test, and production of our critical rotating and hot-section hardware across the gas turbine portfolio, from preliminary sizing through failure investigation and production release.
You will be responsible for the components that spin, carry load, survive operating conditions, and ultimately determine whether the machine works.
What You Will Own
- Turbine stages. Aerodynamic and mechanical design of blades, vanes, and shrouds, including stage matching.
- Disks, shafts, and rotor architecture. Load paths, torque transmission, bearing arrangement, alignment, thermal growth, couplings, and rotor retention.
- Bearings, seals, and secondary flow. Bearing loads, lubrication, and support concepts; seal architectures, leakage, clearances, and cavity flows.
- Hot-section materials and cooling. High-temperature alloys, coatings, heat treatments, and blade cooling.
- Rotor dynamics and vibration. Critical speeds, stability, balance, Campbell diagrams, resonance, and forced response.
- Life and margins. Stress, creep, LCF, HCF, thermal-mechanical fatigue, overspeed, burst margin, component-life predictions, and inspection requirements.
What You Will Do
- Define instrumentation and test requirements, run spin tests, overspeed tests, component rigs, and full-system validation, and correlate analytical models with real hardware performance.
- Lead root-cause investigations (vibration, thermal distress, bearings, cracking, wear, imbalance) and drive corrective action through redesign and re-test.
- Design with manufacturing and suppliers for parts that are producible, inspectable, and scalable across machining, casting, additive manufacturing, coatings, and balancing.
- Manage critical turbomachinery suppliers, and transition prototype hardware into controlled production designs with drawings, specifications, inspection criteria, and manufacturing controls.
- Spot system-level risks early and drive them to closure. Turbomachinery is never an isolated discipline here.
What You Bring
- Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, or a related technical discipline
- ~10 years in gas turbine, jet engine, turbomachinery, or high-speed rotating machinery development
- Strong turbine hot-section experience, with hands-on design of blades, vanes, disks, shafts, or bearings
- Command of turbine aerodynamics, heat transfer, solid mechanics, rotor dynamics, and mechanical design
- Experience with high-temperature materials, coatings, and turbomachinery manufacturing processes, plus a firm grasp of creep, fatigue, fracture, vibration, burst, overspeed, and life prediction
- Full hardware cycles behind you, from design through test, failure investigation, redesign, and production
- Ability to interpret and create drawings, tolerance schemes, specifications, test plans, and manufacturing requirements, with familiarity in balancing, bearing systems, and high-speed rotating equipment
- Sound judgment with incomplete information, comfort with suppliers and technicians, and clear communication
Who You Will Work With
- Controls. Speed limits, acceleration schedules, overspeed protection, and transients.
- Mechanical. Housings, mounts, bearing supports, exhaust, lube, and structural interfaces.
- Combustion. Inlet conditions, pattern factor, and hot-section durability.
- Electrical. Generator and accessory interfaces, torsional behavior, and starting requirements.
- Manufacturing. Machining, casting, additive, coatings, balancing, and production readiness.
- Test. Instrumentation, rig design, vibration monitoring, and teardown analysis.
Bonus Points
Experience in any of these is highly valuable:
- Turbojets, turbofans, turboshafts, or turboprops
- Rolling-element or fluid-film bearings
- Industrial or aeroderivative gas turbines
- Shaft and coupling design
- Blade vibration and forced response
- Turbine blade cooling
- Additively manufactured hot-section hardware
- High-temperature turbine materials
- Investment-cast turbine components
- Spin testing and overspeed testing
- Thermal barrier coatings
- Engine or turbine rig testing
- Gas turbine failure analysis
You Will Thrive Here If
- You want to own hardware, not just analysis. A blade isn't done when the CFD converges, nor a rotor when the margins look good. It has to be built, balanced, and survive the real world.
- You can go from design review to shop floor to test data and back to the model.
- You take failures personally enough to solve them, but objectively enough to learn from them.
- Most importantly, you want responsibility for the machine.
Why Drove Aeropower
- Ownership is real. The engineer responsible for a component stays involved from first design through production.
- Decisions happen quickly. Work directly with hardware, suppliers, manufacturing, test, and company leadership.
- One of the first. As one of Drove's first employees, you will have a real voice in the decisions that shape the product and the company.
- A founder who has done it before. Drove's founder has already successfully built a company, and you will help build the next one.