We're Recruiting!
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We're looking for enthusiastic students from all years at Heriot-Watt's Edinburgh campus.
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While our first round of applications is now closed we welcome unsolicited applications throughout the year (particularly from electrical engineers!) You can apply for any of the roles available using the form at the bottom of this page or via email.
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For more information on the team see the about and meet the team pages and for any general question get in touch with us via social media or by emailing hw-rail@hw.ac.uk.
What are we Looking for from Applicants?
In all our roles we’re looking for people who can think on their feet, work as part of a team and have an interest in engineering. You don’t need to have any railway engineering experience; we’re all going to have to learn as we go along as we’re starting pretty much from scratch, so an ability to learn new on the job will definitely be useful.
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If you’re a team member your focus in the first year will be on coming up with a ready to manufacture design for our locomotive, with an aim to start manufacture next academic year. This will involve working with other team members to come up with a concept design before working on your own to come up with a full CAD design for your assigned component.
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We’ve split the subsystems up between the teams to make the workload more manageable. So, you’ll need to work with members of other subsystem teams to make sure everything will work together when we come to put it all together. This will be coordinated by the subsystem team leads and the senior leadership team, if you’re interested in a leadership position you can find out more about these positions below.
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It all sounds like a big challenge, but they’ll be lots of us working on it together and it’s a great chance to grow your experience, enhance your CV, meet new people and get stuck into a real engineering project.
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What are we Looking for in Leadership Role Candidates?
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In all our leadership roles we are looking for people who are comfortable leading others and have experience in design either from coursework or from outside of university. Some experience with CAD design is essential as part of your role will be to review and sign off designs for components and systems.
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As well as working with your own team you’ll meet regularly with the other subsystem team leaders and the senior leadership team to keep everyone updated and make sure the project is running smoothly. For this first year we are focusing solely on the design phase, with manufacturing planned for the 2024/25 academic year so we'll need you to help with the planning for this stage of the project.
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For the senior leadership roles (Safety lead and technical director) you’ll work across all subsystem teams to oversee the entire design process. You’ll be supported by the team lead and operations manager (Finn) and the treasurer (Mark) to make sure we’re on time and on budget. For all senior and subsystem leader roles you’ll also be part of your chosen subsystem team working on the design for your systems components.
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Roles Available
These descriptions are not set in stone and are just to give an overview of the different roles currently available and what we expect from applicants. See below and click the read more button to find out more about each of the roles.
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Subsystem Team Member
Subystem team members are at the heart of the team, as part of one of our two subsystem teams; Mechanical systems and Electrical and Control you'll work as part of a small team to design and build your choosen susbystem. This role is a great way to gain practical engineering experience and provides a stepping stone to leadership roles in future years. This role is open to all students of all disciplines that are relevant to the subsytem team.