Mechanical Design Engineer, Actuators

Weave Robotics, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Weave Robotics, Inc. builds and deploys bimanual robots for home use, with development centered on our San Francisco floor. Our mission is to ship capable, safe robots that transform daily life.

This role owns the mechanical heart of the program—the transmissions, structures, and thermal design that determine how strong, quiet, and durable every joint is. You’ll prototype, test, and integrate actuator packages with the hardware, controls, and firmware teams.

Qualifications

• 3+ years designing actuators or precision transmissions; shipped in real products.
• Strong mechanical fundamentals: bearings, preload, shaft/housing design, tolerance stacks, GD&T.
• CAD and analysis fluency; hands-on with SolidWorks or similar and basic hand calculations.
• Design life tests, instrument them, and iterate from teardown results.
• Experience integrating actuators with controllers, firmware, and mech teams.

Responsibilities

• Transmission design: planetary, harmonic, and cycloidal stages; analyze torque density and noise.
• Motor integration: rotor/stator interactions with structure and encoder mounting for long-term calibration.
• Actuator package design: structural layout, bearings, seals, and thermal/load paths.
• Life testing: define/run life tests, derive load spectra, and set design margins by evidence.
• Assembly & test design: support in-house subassembly, calibration, and end-of-line tests.
• Performance roadmap: drive actuator performance with controls and firmware teams.

Skills

Actuator design

Mechanical design

CAD (SolidWorks)

FEA analysis

Thermal design

GD&T

Life testing

Tools

SolidWorks

FEA software

Job description

Join Us, and Ship Robots

Weave was founded to build the robots we’d want to have in our own home. We believe the next generation of robotics will transform everyday life by enabling people to do more and to reclaim time to spend on what’s important.

Join Us, and Ship Robots

Weave was founded to build the robots we’d want to have in our own home. We believe the next generation of robotics will transform everyday life by enabling people to do more and to reclaim time to spend on what’s important.

We also believe robots are in a sense like any other product: to matter, they have to ship. Our robots are already operating in real homes and businesses, giving us the opportunity to rapidly improve from real-world experience. With a growing team, strong customer demand, and capital for expansion, we’re entering an exciting stage of growth—and we’re looking for people with exceptional talent and standards to help bring home robotics to millions of households.

The Role

Weave builds and deploys some of the first bimanual robots operating in customer homes. How capable, safe, quiet, and efficient our robots are has a floor, and that floor is set by their actuators. To push it, we design and build our own, on our own floor in San Francisco.

This role owns the mechanical heart of that program: the transmissions, structures, and thermal design that determine how strong, precise, quiet, and durable every joint in the robot is.

Responsibilities

• Transmission design: Planetary, harmonic and cycloidal stages. Selection, design and analysis for torque density, stiffness, backlash, efficiency and noise.
• Motor integration: Work with the rest of the Mechanical and Hardware team on rotor/stator integration, magnetic and thermal interactions with the structure and encoder mounting that holds calibration in years under heavy duty cycling.
• Actuator package design: Structural design, bearings and preload, sealing against dust and general ingress, and thermal and load paths.
• Life testing: Define and run life testing: cycle tests, load spectra derived from real fleet data, teardown analysis, and design margins set by evidence.
• Assembly & test design: These actuators are subassembled, calibrated, and tested in-house. Design for that reality with the rest of the mechanical team, from assembly sequence to end of line test.
• Performance roadmap: Drive the actuator performance envelope alongside controls, firmware and mechanical teams.

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years designing actuators or precision transmissions (or equivalent research experience): Your work must have shipped in real products: robot joints, servo drives, e-mobility drivetrains, precision motion systems, or similar.
• Transmission depth: gear train design, material and part selection, manufacturing methods and DFM.
• Strong mechanical fundamentals: bearings and preload, shaft and housing design, tolerance stacks, GD&T, fatigue, and thermal design.
• CAD and analysis fluency: SolidWorks-class CAD, FEA used with judgment, and hand calculations whenever practical.
• Test-driven habits: You've designed life tests, instrumented them, and iterated a design based off of teardown results.

Nice to Have

• Acoustic experience: experience making gearboxes quieter and intuition on where transmission noise comes from.
• Experience with QDD actuation: and the transparency/backdrivability tradeoffs it buys.
• EVT/DVT/PVT experience: taking an actuator or precision assembly into volume production.