Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

Kodu; Greater London; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company pension

Lunch covered every day

Job summary

Kodu in London is automating human cell culture with a fluid path system. The role sits in a hardware team, taking consumables from concept through tooling to validated production, deciding joining/sealing methods, designing elastomer parts, and building test rigs to prove parts work beyond prototypes.

You will select suppliers and work in sprints with fellow engineers. Start ASAP, reporting to the Hardware Lead in a team of around eight, based at the Imperial College innovation hub, White City.

Qualifications

• Experience designing high-volume injection moulded plastic parts and taking them through tooling to validated production.
• Hands-on experience with leak-tight assemblies and joining technologies (welded, bonded or overmoulded).
• A design that has shipped and is in real use with production quantities.
• Experience managing suppliers for thousands of parts, not just prototypes.

Responsibilities

• Take the concept through tooling to validated production.
• Choose and prove joining and sealing methods for the system.
• Design elastomer components and build test rigs to validate parts.
• Select suppliers, set process with them, and manage sprint-based work with a small team.
• Collaborate closely with electronics and software engineers.

Skills

High-volume design

Supplier management

Project leadership

Mechanical design

Tools

Injection moulding tooling

Job description

Own the fluid path system at the heart of a machine already working inside major US biotechs, with the part design, tooling, joining, suppliers and validation all sitting with you. Next year, cells grown on this kit are due to go into Parkinson's patients.

Our client is a London based company automating human cell culture, the most manual job left in biotech. Its machines run inside multibillion dollar biotechs on both US coasts. The engineers come from Dyson, Formlabs and Cambridge Consultants, working alongside scientists from Imperial, Cambridge and UCL. Three mechanical engineers redesigned the whole machine in five weeks.

The role

The system is a set of single-use consumables, meso-scale fluid paths, connectors, manifolds, valves and seals, made in thousands rather than millions. You'll take them from concept through tooling to validated production, choose and prove the joining and sealing methods, design the elastomer parts, and build the test rigs that show the hundredth part works as well as the first. You'll pick the suppliers, set the process with them, and work in sprints alongside two or three other mechanical engineers, with electronics and software close by.

You'd set how a whole domain gets designed at a company with product in market, and help grow the early-career engineers around you. As consumables grow, there's scope to build a team under you.

What you'll need

• A track record of designing high-volume injection moulded plastic parts and taking them through tooling to validated production, with the DFM, tooling and cavitation decisions made by you.
• Hands-on experience of leak-tight assemblies, welded, bonded or overmoulded, where the choice of joining technology was yours.
• Something you designed that's in real use, and evidence it worked at more than prototype quantities.
• Experience managing suppliers and bringing new ones up to speed quickly, at volumes of thousands of parts rather than millions.

The details

• Reporting to the Hardware Lead, in a hardware team of around eight
• Based in the Imperial College innovation hub, White City
• Supplier and contract manufacturer visits as needed
• Start: ASAP
• Company pension
• Lunch covered every day

What it isn't

This isn't a big, structured medtech with a process for everything. Development runs under ISO 9001, the regulated quality system sits with production, and decisions often get made before every answer is in. It moves fast and the days are full. Nobody clocks in, but the hardware lives in the lab, so most of the team are in most days and you'll want to live within easy reach of White City. If you like making the call, building in a fallback and getting parts to customers fast, that's the point.