Senior Manufacturing Solutions Architect

Instrumental Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health

Vision

Dental

Public Transit

Maternity/Paternity Leave

Job summary

Instrumental is hiring a Principal Manufacturing Solutions Engineer to work across AI infrastructure, networking gear, consumer electronics, and defense, delivering end-to-end hardware and software solutions directly on production lines.

You will own scoping technical tradeoffs with customer teams, presenting cases to operations and business stakeholders, and influencing cost, yield, and throughput. This is a rare path combining engineering depth with strategic impact.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, product design, automation, test equipment, or related disciplines.
• Experience on high-volume electronics or NPI manufacturing floors.
• Fluency in DFMs, tolerance analysis, and mechanical design tradeoffs.
• Builder's mindset; willing to tackle ambiguous problems.
• Startup experience or independent initiative is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Architect customer manufacturing solutions with cross-functional teams to maximize coverage and throughput.
• Lead technical customer engagements across lifecycle, balancing cycle time, manufacturability, ergonomics, cost, and inspection coverage.
• Design production-ready hardware: station placement, imaging strategy, fixtures, optics, lighting for high-volume lines.
• Turn manufacturing data into decisions by integrating customer data into actionable floor-level insights.

Skills

Excellent communication

Strong CAD skills

Problem solving

Customer-facing

Tools

SolidWorks

Creo

NX

Job description

Instrumental is hiring a Principal Manufacturing Solutions Engineer to work across AI infrastructure, networking gear, consumer electronics, and defense, delivering end-to-end hardware and software solutions directly on production lines.

You will own scoping technical tradeoffs with customer teams, presenting cases to operations and business stakeholders, and influencing cost, yield, and throughput. This is a rare path combining engineering depth with strategic impact.