Design Director Jobs in Madison, WI (NOW HIRING)

Haast Autonomous is building an autonomous aircraft network for time-sensitive medical logistics. We’re developing long-range VTOL aircraft, autonomy software, and the operational foundation needed to move critical payloads between hospitals, labs, and healthcare facilities on-demand faster and more reliably.

We’re early, small, and moving quickly. Joining now means you'll have a direct role in shaping the foundation of Haast — our culture, engineering process, testing discipline, partner relationships, and the path from prototype to a real medical logistics network.

We’re looking for high-agency people who want ownership, urgency, and system-level impact from day one.

As a Mechanical Design & Prototyping Engineer at Haast, you’ll help design and build the physical aircraft systems that make our autonomous aircraft network possible, with a strong emphasis on tailoring solutions to customer needs and prototyping user-focused experiences.

You’ll work across CAD, structures, prototyping, aircraft packaging, fixtures, payload integration, manufacturing, and flight-test support. This is a hands-on role focused on customer-first design, including design for manufacturing and usability. We’re looking for someone who can design a part, build it, install it, watch it fail, improve it, and get it ready for the next test—always with the end user and customer requirements in mind.

• Design and develop airframes, structures, mechanisms, mounts, fixtures, and prototype hardware with a focus on user experience and customer requirements.

• Own CAD for key airframe and mechanical systems, ensuring designs are manufacturable and tailored to customer use cases.

• Design payload bays, landing gear, motor mounts, avionics mounts, access panels, covers, brackets, internal structure, and payload compartments optimized for user accessibility and operational efficiency.

• Build prototypes using 3D printing, composites, foam, carbon fiber, hand tools, and other rapid fabrication methods, continuously iterating based on user testing and feedback.

• Create detailed part drawings, assembly documentation, BOMs, and revision history focused on clarity and ease of use for manufacturing and customer support.

• Work with avionics and controls engineers to package sensors, wiring, batteries, antennas, and payload interfaces that support real-world use scenarios.

• Improve the aircraft for buildability, repairability, serviceability, usability, and repeatability.

• Support aircraft assembly, pre-flight inspections, field repairs, post-test teardown, and customer-driven design changes.

• Track mass properties, center of gravity, structural changes, manufacturing constraints, and customer impact.

• Help move Haast from one-off prototypes toward aircraft hardware that can support a real autonomous medical logistics network, with customer experience at the core.

• Strong CAD skills in SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Onshape, CATIA, NX, or similar.

• Experience building real hardware and iterating with customer feedback, not just designing it.

• Good mechanical intuition around structures, load paths, fasteners, adhesives, vibration, packaging, manufacturability, and usability.

• Comfortable working with 3D printing, composites, foam, carbon fiber, basic shop tools, and rapid prototyping in service of user-centered solutions.

• Ability to move quickly without being sloppy, while maintaining customer-focused quality.

• Strong ownership and initiative. You don’t wait around for perfect requirements and proactively engage with user-related challenges.

• Good documentation habits so the team can actually track what changed and how it addresses customer needs.

• Excitement to work in a startup environment where the aircraft, process, and company are all being built at the same time, centered on customer-driven design.

• Experience with UAVs, RC aircraft, fixed-wing aircraft, VTOL aircraft, robotics, motorsports, or aerospace hardware.

• Composite layup, vacuum bagging, mold design, or foam-core construction experience.

• Experience with lightweight aircraft structures, spars, ribs, motor mounts, control surfaces, or landing gear.

• Familiarity with aircraft CG, stability, vibration, thermal, avionics packaging, and user experience constraints.

• Experience on a student design team, aerospace startup, robotics team, race team, or a fast-moving hardware project where customer feedback played a significant role.

Within your first month, you’ll understand the aircraft architecture, clean up critical CAD and build issues, and help prepare the next prototype for testing—with attention to how the design satisfies customer needs.

Within three months, you’ll have helped us build stronger, cleaner, more repeatable aircraft hardware and improved the speed at which we can design, build, test, and iterate user-focused designs.

We care more about agency, ownership, taste, and evidence that you can build than whether you match every bullet point. If you have worked on aircraft, drones, robots, vehicles, rockets, or other hard technical systems and want to help build something from the ground up, we want to hear from you.