Purser Industries
Principal Engineer — Purser Industries, Camberley £90–120,000
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Reading this at your desk? Good. They're paying you to find us — there's a certain justice in that.
Tuck the lanyard in, though. It's swinging over the keyboard, and where you're going, you won't need it.
The one-sentence version
We have removed every layer between you and the aircraft.
No integrated product team. No matrix. No review board that outranks the evidence. There is you, the drawing, the workshop, and the sky — and everything else has been removed on purpose.
What a week here looks like
- Monday, it's a roll of glass cloth and a tin of resin.
- Tuesday it comes out of the mould — stiff, light, and suddenly an aircraft.
- Wednesday it grows a nervous system: wiring, servos, a brain.
- Thursday you carry it out of the building — you, personally, arms full of aircraft — and by Friday it's climbing out over a test range at 400 km/h while you watch the telemetry with your heart somewhere near your collarbone.
- The week after that, a customer shoots it down. Then they order more.
That's the business. Our customers destroy our products as fast as we can make them — the most honest feedback loop in engineering, and the reason nothing here stands still long enough to gather a committee. We shipped twice last week. This is the slow year.
Whose money this is
There is no venture capital here. No burn rate, no board deck, no pivot pencilled in for the quarter the funding dries up. One man owns this company — me — and it is funded by customers who pay in advance for machines that exist. It is my money and my signature on the risk, which is why ambitious proposals get answered in the time a kettle takes to boil. Nothing in this building has ever been prepared for an investor. We prepare things for the sky.
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No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
And this is what the money is for:
We are making ramjet propulsion cheap.
The ramjet is the purest engine ever conceived — a shaped tube that turns speed into more speed, no moving parts, nothing to wear out. Nobody abandoned it. This country simply abandoned the spirit that builds such things: the shed-and-slide-rule, first-flight-by-Friday, English spirit of getting it fucking done.
We've started again.
The path is under our feet and it pays for itself: the target-drone business funds the ladder — electric flew, petrol flew, turbojets enter production next. The turbojets then earn their keep twice: as transonic targets at our prices, and as our test fleet — because when a ramjet needs airspeed to breathe, we don't wait eighteen months for tunnel time. We bolt it to a turbojet aircraft and fly it to speed. Our wind tunnel has wings.
Subsonic ramjets first, honestly, iterated at workshop prices — build the engine, fly the engine, measure everything, build the next one. Weekly, not yearly. The data comes home with grass stains on it.
And at the top of the ladder, inevitably: a clean-sheet British aircraft through the sound barrier, built by a team that fits in one photograph. The boom is not the goal. The boom is the receipt.
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The job
Principal engineer in the old sense of the words. First principles to flight line. Aero, structures, propulsion, integration — real analysis, then real hardware, built in dozens by ordinary hands at speed.
Build it. Fly it. Break it. Understand why. Fly again — within the fortnight.
Your name goes on the drawing. Your judgment goes on the line. The sky is the final design review: it cannot be lobbied, and its approval is the only kind that has ever meant anything.
What you bring
- Things that flew.
- Depth in two of: aero, structures, propulsion, GNC.
- Hands that have built what your CAD promised.
- The judgment to know when a design needs more analysis — and when it needs a prototype.
- Ambition at full strength, undiluted. Here it is a tool, not a condition to be managed.
Terms
- On-site, five days — hardware is not built down a video call.
- Work-life balance: none, and let's not lie to each other in the first meeting. Everyone in this building would be designing aircraft anyway — in sheds, in notebook margins — and has simply arranged to be paid handsomely for the compulsion.
- The salary is in the title. We don't discuss money twice.
The rest is simple
One day soon, a boom will roll across a test range, made by an aircraft from an unglamorous building in Camberley. The people who built it will fit in one photograph.
There is a space in it.
Get it done and let them howl.
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