Principal Stress Engineer

About the Job

Our mission

At Vertical Aerospace, we are pioneering the way for electric aviation. The VX4, our eVTOL (electric, vertical, take-off and landing), ‘zero emissions’ aircraft will set a new safety standard for how we will navigate the sky.

We won’t realise our mission following the same legacy processes and traditions our predecessors followed, instead, we want to ‘redefine’ aerospace best practices.

We are growing quickly from a prototype business to a scaling SME, and the next few years will be critical to our success and delivering on our ambitious goals of having the VX4 in service by 2030.

What to expect

Join Vertical Aerospace’s Airframe Design Team in Bristol and shape the future of flight as we develop a revolutionary electric aircraft. As Principal Stress Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in leading structural analysis across the full airframe—through prototype, certification, and into production. This is a rare opportunity to influence the entire product lifecycle of a novel eVTOL aircraft from the ground up.

What you'll do

• Provide technical direction across the Airframe stress teams, ensuring robust, pragmatic and consistent structural analysis approaches.

• Lead and participate in design reviews, challenging assumptions to drive optimal and certifiable design solutions.

• Act as a key technical approver for stress analyses, reports and airframe drawings.

• Guide certification activities, advising on compliance strategies and suitable methods of substantiation.

• Mentor and develop engineers across the team, fostering a high-performance, collaborative culture.

What you'll bring

• Broad experience across the full product lifecycle: from clean-sheet design and prototyping, through to certification and serial production of novel aircraft.

• Proven structural stress engineering experience, ideally on eVTOL, UAM, or similarly innovative aerospace programmes.

• Strong working knowledge of composite airframe structures, across the entire aircraft (not limited to a specific part or subsystem).

• Deep understanding of systems engineering principles and the V&V process.

• A pragmatic mindset—comfortable balancing analytical rigour with fast-paced development timelines, and knowing when to use hand calculations versus detailed FEA.

• Proficiency with Hyperworks, or strong transferable skills from other FEA tools (e.g., NASTRAN, Abaqus).

• Knowledge of fatigue & damage tolerance, crashworthiness, or impact methodologies is highly desirable.

• Clear communicator with excellent organisational skills, capable of engaging across multi-disciplinary engineering teams.

What can you expect from us?

We're on a mission. Where others see limits, we see opportunity, and we work at pace. Working at Vertical isn't your average role but for those seeking a challenge, a flexible, supportive organisation and an incredible team; working here is an opportunity to do the best work of your career.

Our approach promotes ingenuity and courage, while our environment builds success through diligence in safety and being open in the way we work. The only way we're going to assure the next chapter of aviation history is by working as a team, relentlessly, towards our goal. 

Our benefits

Our people matter - we're not going anywhere without them. Which is why our company benefits go beyond the essentials.

• 26 days holiday, plus bank holiday

• 5 extra days per year to buy (or sell)

• 5 extra days holiday when you get married or enter a civil partnership

• Additional 4% of your salary to spend on extra benefits

• Award-winning digital health and wellbeing service (Help@Hand)

• Company Share Scheme - open to every Vertical employee

• Company Pension Scheme - 5% and we match it

• Breakfast on us, every day

We may just be the hardest job you've ever had, but we're confident it will be the most rewarding. Join the team today and help us shape the future of Advanced Air Mobility.

Disclaimer Statement

We encourage you to apply even if you may not have all the experience listed in the advert. We recognise that talent comes in various forms and we are committed to providing opportunities that create an environment of growth, diversity, and inclusion for everyone. As part of our desire to review and make our processes fair, we may ask you questions related to these aspects during the application process. For more information on how we will use your data, see our Legal section.