Stagiaire Conception CAO & protoypage mécatronique

Overview

Alta Ares, an air defense company founded in 2024, is offering a six-month internship in Toulouse, France, in mechanical CAD design and mechatronic prototyping. Alta Ares builds AI-guided interceptors to counter drones and cruise missiles, along with the software platform behind them. Its customers are NATO-aligned militaries and defense institutions. The company has grown to 90 people and raised over 60 million dollars.

Within the technical team, the intern takes part in designing and building prototypes, mainly drones and their onboard equipment. The work centres on mechanical CAD design, with parts made mostly by 3D printing, and occasionally covers integration and sizing of onboard electronics to validate prototypes from modelling to first tests.

What you will do

About 55 percent of the role is CAD design in Fusion 360 of structures, housings, mounts and payload interfaces, taking FDM printing constraints into account and iterating quickly on test feedback. About 30 percent is industrialisation: evolving validated prototypes into producible versions using design for manufacturing and assembly principles, optimising mass, cost and part count, helping write assembly instructions, producing wiring diagrams and building the product definition file. The remainder covers rapid prototyping and print preparation in OrcaSlicer, sizing and integrating components such as motors, ESCs, batteries, flight controllers and sensors, configuring systems in Mission Planner, taking part in bench, ground and supervised flight tests, and documenting and presenting results to the technical team.

Requirements

Applicants should be students at Bac+3 to Bac+5 level in mechanical design, mechanical engineering, mechatronics or an equivalent field, ideally on an end-of-studies internship. They need very good command of 3D CAD software, ideally Autodesk Fusion, knowledge of FDM design rules, basics of strength of materials, tolerancing and materials such as PLA, PETG, ASA, nylon and filled composites, and basics of embedded electronics including schematics, power, soldering and wiring.

Knowledge of drones (multirotors, fixed wing, ArduPilot, PX4), aerodynamics, personal or club projects in drones, robotics or 3D printing, and an interest in aerospace or defense are advantages. Rigour, autonomy and teamwork are expected.