Mechanical Design Engineer

Mechanical Design Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Up to $170K + Equity

Visa transfer available

My client is a robotics Start up building autonomous robots that build and maintain AI infrastructure. Every new data centre has to be racked, cabled, commissioned and kept running, and today that work is done by hand. No one has automated it yet, and they are doing it.

The robots are purpose-built, not humanoid, and engineered as measurable systems rather than black-box AI. Perception, force sensing and controls are separate modules you can test and debug, with vision accurate to 25 microns. In the team's words, they'd rather be Waymo than a demo video.

The company is partnered with the world's largest AI infrastructure companies and builds against real customer deadlines, not research milestones.

Everything is built in-house: mechanical, electrical, firmware, software and machine learning under one roof, with an in-house fabrication shop. Getting a new part used to take 6 weeks; now it takes 1 day.

We're looking for a Mechanical Engineer to be the backbone of how we turn designs into working hardware. This is intentionally a hands-on ownership role. You'll own a subassembly and its parts from first sketch to validated hardware while partnering closely with the rest of the engineering team on whatever is highest leverage at any given moment. This is a role for someone who loves the full build-test loop: you'll design a part, do the analysis to back it up, make it, test it on the robot, and turn a failed test into a revised part the same week.

You'll touch every stage of your hardware, which means real ownership and room to grow quickly. The impact is significant: the subassemblies you own go straight onto the machines that scale AI infrastructure worldwide, and nothing you design gets handed off halfway.

Responsibilities

• Own a subassembly and its parts through design, hand calcs, FEA, fabrication, assembly, and validation
• Own the supporting analysis: hand calcs, tolerance stack-ups, fastener and material selection, and basic FEA
• Build, assemble, and test your own parts on test fixtures and on the robot
• Iterate fast: turn feedback from a failed test into a revised part the same week

Requirements:

• 2 - 5 years of experience in mechanical design
• Designed actuated mechanisms that move accurately and repeatably (linear actuators, motors, drives)
• Mechanical engineering degree
• First- principles intuition: spots a wrong number or direction & and backs decisions with hand calcs or FEA
• Must be on- site in San Francisco 5 days/week (6 days/week during crunch time)
• Developed a mechanical subsystem end- to- end at a fast- moving hardware company
• Designs for steel and aluminum fabrication (machining, sheet metal, welding)
• Electromechanical mechanisms experience (robotics, aerospace, or automotive)
• Integrated sensing (load cells, force sensors) into a mechanism
• Startup or small- team experience designing full sub- assemblies with resource constraints

Why Join

• Full ownership, vertically integrated, and learn fast
• Rapid hardware-led development. Engineers own projects end-to-end, with access to whatever help they need.
• A small team rapidly growing
• Small, tight-knit team with real ownership. A strong ability to make an incredible impact on the direction of the product.
• In-house fab shop in Dogpatch, San Francisco
• On-site staffed fabrication shop. Hardware built and iterated in-house, from weeks to hours.