Mechanical Engineer - Lab Automation & Robotics (SF Onsite)

C5R; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

C5R builds research facilities in San Francisco to enable frontier-model experiments with automated benches, robots, and instruments. You will own the mechanical design across the stack and be hands-on on the floor when things don’t go as planned.

In this role you’ll design fixtures, enclosures, and interfaces, while collaborating with controls and ML engineers to continuously improve reliability and performance in a lab-in-the-loop environment.

Qualifications

• Strong practical mechanical engineering experience. You should have built and debugged real hardware, not only models.
• CAD fluency (Onshape, Solidworks, or equivalent) with real design intent — parts that get made, not parts that look good in a render.
• Hands-on fabrication experience: 3D printing, machining, laser cutting, sheet metal, or other rapid prototyping workflows.
• Good fundamentals in tolerancing, materials, fastening, and mechanism design.
• Comfort at the boundary with other disciplines — you should be able to read a schematic, reason about a motor’s torque curve, and talk to a controls engineer without a translator.

Responsibilities

• Designing gripper fingertip or plate fixture that survives ten thousand pick cycles without calibration drift.
• Building the mechanical interface between a robot arm and a scientific instrument that was never meant to be automated.
• Designing enclosures, mounts, and cable management for benches with arms, cameras, power distribution, and networking.
• Running tolerance and structural analysis on a bench frame, then machining or printing the part the same week to prove it out.
• Collaborating with controls and ML engineers to understand failures and concretely improve fixtures or mounts.

Skills

Mechanical design

CAD fluency

Fabrication

Tolerance analysis

Schematic reading

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

Onshape

SolidWorks

Job description

C5R builds research facilities in San Francisco to enable frontier-model experiments with automated benches, robots, and instruments. You will own the mechanical design across the stack and be hands-on on the floor when things don’t go as planned.

In this role you’ll design fixtures, enclosures, and interfaces, while collaborating with controls and ML engineers to continuously improve reliability and performance in a lab-in-the-loop environment.