Mechanical Engineer

Vendra (YC S24); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Vendra is a fast-growing manufacturing startup in San Francisco seeking a hands-on mechanical engineer to scale how complex parts move from CAD to reality. You will read 2D drawings, assess manufacturability, and work with suppliers to turn designs into production while building automated tools.

You’ll collaborate across engineering, operations, and product, wearing hardware, software and supply chain hats.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with CNC machining and additive manufacturing.
• Ability to read GD&T and 3D/2D CAD drawings.
• Experience taking parts from design to production.
• Proficiency with Python for data analysis and automation; AI experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Read and interpret 2D drawings and CAD to understand requirements.
• Identify manufacturing risks early and flag DFM issues.
• Match customer requirements to suppliers in the network and qualify suppliers.
• Develop internal tools for supplier matching and RFQ workflows.
• Collaborate with customers and manufacturers to resolve issues and drive production.

Skills

CNC machining

Additive manufacturing

GD&T

2D drawings

CAD interpretation

Data analysis

Python scripting

AI for research

Education

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering

Tools

Python

Cursor

Claude Code

Job description

We’re a fast growing manufacturing startup (30%+ MoM growth) working with top aerospace and defense teams, and we’re hiring a mechanical engineer to help scale how complex parts go from CAD to reality.

This is a highly technical, hands‑on role. In a normal day, you’ll

• Read and interpret 2D drawings and CAD.
• Identify manufacturing risks before parts ever get to a supplier.
• Match parts to the right supplier and process using tons of real data.
• Work directly with customer and manufacturers to resolve issues.
• Run supplier operations from RFQ to quote to production management to delivery.
• Help turn human engineering judgment (aka all of the above) into reliable, automated software systems.

What You’ll Work On

You’ll operate across engineering, operations, and product, and help build out internal processes and tools from scratch. This isn’t a typical CAD‑only mechanical design role. You’ll wear hardware engineering, software engineering, and supply chain hats as needed.

Core Responsibilities

• Evaluate parts for manufacturability
  • Read and interpret 2D drawings and 3D CAD to understand customer requirements (GD&T, material, finish, setup, etc.).
  • Flag manufacturing risks early (DFM, impossible geometry, material inconsistencies, etc.).
• Supplier matching and qualification
  • Match customer requirements to suppliers in the Vendra network based on capabilities, real‑time capacity, and past experience.
  • Help qualify new suppliers and processes (what they can build well, not just what they claim).
  • Build structure around capturing supplier experience (past performance, on‑time‑delivery, etc.) and feed it into our matching systems.
• System and automation
  • Help design internal tools for supplier matching, drawing/CAD analysis, and automating RFQ and production workflows.
  • We capture a ton of valuable data on suppliers – technical details of the parts they win, quality metrics, response times and feedback, etc. – all of which needs to feed into the core RFQ analysis and matching system we’re building.

Required Qualifications

What we’re looking for

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (or equivalent practical experience).
• Strong experience with manufacturing, specifically in
  • CNC machining (metals, plastics, composites).
  • Additive manufacturing (FDM, SLA, SLS, DMLS, or similar).
• Proven ability to
  • Read and understand complex 2D drawings (GD&T, tolerances, notes).
  • Analyze CAD models to understand manufacturing processes and identify manufacturing issues quickly and accurately.
• Hands on experience taking parts from design → prototype → production.
• Experience with Python or other software tools to analyze data and automate parts of your workflow (parsing 2D drawings, analyzing supplier performance, building internal tools).
• Experience with using AI effectively for research, data analysis, and problem solving.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with supplier qualification and capability assessments.
• Experience in high‑mix manufacturing (at both low and high volume).
• Experience building or working with software tooling (especially process automation).
• Experience in fast‑moving startups without day‑to‑day structure.

You’ll thrive in this role if you’re a hands‑on engineer who’s naturally curious about how things are made. If you look at a part and immediately think about fixturing, tolerances, or failure modes, you’re a good fit.

Comfort with code is also important. You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you should be able to use tools like Cursor or Claude Code to write simple Python scripts to analyze data and automate parts of your work. We expect engineers on this team to constantly be thinking about ways of turning the manual sourcing and manufacturing process into smart internal tools and workflows over time.