Mechanical Design Engineer Intern

Matic; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 34,000 - 48,000; Full time

Job summary

Matic is seeking an engineering intern in Menlo Park to own parts and sub-assemblies from concept to production. You’ll design components, build prototypes, and run tests on hardware intended for home use, seeing results in the field within months.

You will work with EE, firmware, software, and industrial design to balance parts within the system, gaining hands-on experience with production processes and design-for-manufacturing.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering or related field.
• Hands-on experience with hardware design and prototypes.
• Familiarity with high-volume manufacturing processes is a plus.
• Understanding of tolerances affecting assemblies and fits.
• Proficient in SolidWorks and CAD for real hardware.

Responsibilities

• Design parts and sub-assemblies for mass production.
• Build prototypes, test, and iterate quickly.
• Run component-level testing for performance and durability.
• Create production-ready 2D drawings with review.
• Collaborate with engineers and suppliers on DFM feedback.

Skills

SolidWorks

CAD

GD&T

Prototype testing

High-volume manufacturing

Education

Pursuing mechanical engineering degree

Tools

FEA

PDM/PLM

Job description

Company Overview

Each year, 2.5 trillion hours are spent on household chores. At Matic, we’re on a mission to recapture that lost time, and we’re doing it by revolutionizing home robotics.

Our first product, also called Matic, is a Wall-E-esque floor cleaning robot. We've built what amounts to "full self-driving in the home" with real-time 3D mapping, adaptive path-tracking, and a precise semantic understanding of the home. Our breakthroughs in spatial AI allow Matic to work reliably in real homes, using only RGB cameras and neural networks running on-device.

Privacy First

What happens in the home, stays in the home. Our robots are private by design, with all data processing performed by the robot itself, not in the cloud.

Our Approach

Before the iPhone, consumers adopted several distinct devices; cell phones, PDAs, and portable music players each served a particular need. We believe in a similar progression for home robotics, starting with single-purpose robots and building iteratively toward more complex capabilities over time.

Our Culture

Matic is a tight-knit and collaborative team, singularly focused on building products our customers will cherish. We're ultra-hardworking people committed to solving tough problems that save precious time and energy.

About the role

You’ll own parts and sub-assemblies with support from experienced engineers, contributing from concept through high volume production. Our robots are shipping to customers today, which means the parts you work on get tooled, built at volume, and used daily in someone's home. You’ll have the opportunity to see your work in the field within months, not years.

This is an internship for someone who wants to get their hands on real hardware immediately and build the judgment that comes from watching designs succeed and fail in production.

What you’ll do

• Design parts and sub-assemblies within a defined architecture, and help carry them through to mass production

• Build your own prototypes, break them, and iterate fast

• Run component level testing for performance, durability, and part to part variability

• Help write and execute accelerated test plans that predict field behavior

• Create production-ready 2D drawings with guidance and review from the team

• Work with engineers, vendors, and CMs on DFM feedback, tooling reviews, and first article inspection

• Collaborate with EE, firmware, software, and industrial design to keep your parts balanced against the rest of the system

What we look for

• Parts or assemblies you personally designed and built through internships, project teams, research, or personal projects, and the ability to explain your design decisions

• Familiarity with high volume manufacturing processes such as injection molding, die casting, stamping, or metal injection molding, and an interest in learning how they shape a design

• An understanding of tolerances and how individual part dimensions affect an assembly

• Familiarity with engineering drawings and basic GD&T

• SolidWorks proficiency and experience using CAD to build real hardware

• A hands-on approach to prototyping, testing, and troubleshooting

• An ability to reason from a failure back to a possible design or manufacturing cause

• Comfort in a fast-paced startup where the answer is often “go build it and find out”

Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering or a related technical field, or demonstrating equivalent hands‑on experience. Prior experience with FEA, PDM/PLM, or production hardware is a plus, but not required.

Engineering Culture at Matic

We’re a small team building a hard product. The work doesn’t sort itself into a clean design lane.

During your internship, you’ll work on concepts and CAD. You’ll also build test fixtures, run tolerance studies, troubleshoot life tests, tear down returned units, update drawings, and learn how parts move from a design to a production line.

None of that is beneath the job. All of it is the job, and most of it is where you’ll get good.

Our engineers own their parts from the first sketch to the last field failure, including every unglamorous step in between. As an intern, you’ll take on meaningful pieces of that work with support and feedback from the team. We keep design, testing, supplier work, and documentation together on purpose, because that’s how you build the judgment to design something that actually survives a home.

The same goes past your own scope. If a fixture in the lab is broken, if data needs cleaning, if a different subsystem is blocking the build, people here move toward it. Scope is how we plan the work, not how we decide what’s ours.

That’s the shape of the team we’re building. Being excited about a particular kind of engineering is great and we want that. But the people who’ve done the most for this company are the ones who wanted Matic to win first and picked up whatever that took.

We’d love to hear from you if...

• You are genuinely motivated to help those around you

• You are passionate about learning outside your normal comfort zones

• You love diagnosing complex technical issues

• You take pride in details nobody else would notice

Compensation

Base: $25- $35/hour.
Actual Compensation will depend on skills, experience, and qualifications.