Location: Onsite — Austin, TX

Employment Type: Direct Hire, Full‑Time

Job Title: Senior Electrical Harness Engineer

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

EDDA's cables are its nerves, and we're hiring the person who owns them: every harness in the product — power, signal, data and fiber — from wire list through connector selection, routing across moving axes, bench prototyping, qualification and production sourcing. You have shipped rugged, high-flex-life harnesses and are equally at home with copper, fiber and hybrid builds.

EDDA is the low-cost counter-UAS solution, so the job is one judgment made hundreds of times: rugged where it matters, cost-efficient where it doesn't. MIL-spec circular connectors and continuous-flex cable where a harness crosses the elevation axis and takes recoil; a less-rugged sealed connector and standard jacket where it sits bolted inside the base. You defend each call with test data and a cost roll-up.

What You'll Own

Power: battery, bus and motor-drive feeds — conductor sizing, voltage drop, thermal budgets, fusing, grounding.

Signal and data: encoder, sensor, CAN, Ethernet, USB and camera links, with the shielding they need.

Fiber and hybrid: EMI-immune, high-bandwidth links between sensor heads and compute, including copper/fiber hybrids through one rugged connector.

Moving axes: continuous-flex and torsion-rated cables, service loops, cable carriers and slip-ring interfaces across EDDA's azimuth and elevation joints.

Connectors and sealing: rugged circular MIL-spec where it earns its place, less-rugged sealed or overmolded connectors where it doesn't.

Manufacturing and sourcing: formboard drawings, IPC/WHMA-A-620 workmanship, contract-manufacturer qualification, second sources and cost-down.

Essential Duties

Architect the harness system: turn the electrical architecture into a harness topology — segmentation, connector locations, grounding and shield strategy, service loops and slip-ring boundaries — that is buildable, field-serviceable and cheap to make.

Design and specify: wire lists, schematics, 3-D routings and formboard drawings; select conductors, jackets, shielding and connectors against electrical, environmental and cost requirements, with the margin shown.

Design for flex life: specify cable construction, bend radii, twist limits, carrier geometry and strain relief for harnesses that cross moving axes and take recoil; set and prove cycle-life targets.

Prototype at the bench: build first-article harnesses yourself — crimp, solder, terminate fiber, trial overmolds — so every drawing is proven by hand before it goes to a supplier.

Test and qualify: flex, pull and vibration rigs; continuity, hipot and insertion-loss tests; shock, vibration, temperature, water and dust qualification; root-cause failures that come back from the range.

Engineer the cost: hold the harness BOM to target — standardize connector families, cut unique part numbers, go rugged only where the requirement demands it.

Source and release: qualify contract manufacturers, run RFQs, manage second sources and lead times, and release drawings and acceptance tests that production can build from without you.

Requirements

Experience: 8+ years designing, specifying and sourcing cable harnesses for shipped hardware — robotics, aerospace, defense or industrial equipment that lives outdoors and gets abused.