Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

MATIC; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary with equity

Job summary

Matic is seeking a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer to lead design of critical subassemblies and collaborate with hardware, software and product teams to achieve full home autonomy.

You will own end-to-end subsystem development, translate product goals into requirements, and optimize cost, mass, acoustics, serviceability, manufacturability and reliability while guiding others with hands-on mentorship.

Qualifications

• Evidence of independent technical judgment at subsystem scale.
• You've been through at least one full production ramp and can talk about what broke between T1 and mass production.
• Deep command of high volume manufacturing, particularly injection molding, at the level of tool design conversations with a supplier.
• You've built a tolerance and variation strategy for an assembly, including how you decided what to control and what to leave open.
• Test design judgment: you've built accelerated test plans that correlated to field data, and you know when an acceleration model does not apply.
• You've made a call under uncertainty, been wrong, caught it, and fixed it.

Responsibilities

• Own a critical subsystem end to end: requirements, architecture, detailed design, validation, tooling, and ramp.
• Turn a vague product goal into a set of engineering requirements and defend the ones that matter when they conflict.
• Make and own tradeoffs across cost, mass, acoustics, serviceability, manufacturability, and reliability, and explain the reasoning to people outside your discipline.
• Own the tolerance budget for the full assembly, not just individual stacks.
• Decide where to spend analysis, where to spend test, and where to just build it.
• Drive suppliers from tooling kickoff through T1 and T2 to a qualified process, and hold the line on quality when the schedule pushes back.
• Own the failure investigations in your area, from field returns back to root cause and corrective action.
• Raise the technical level of the engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the standard you set on your own drawings.

Skills

Subsystem ownership

Production ramp experience

High volume manufacturing

Tolerance strategy

Test design judgment

Hands-on

Mentorship

Escalation management

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Problem solving under uncertainty

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or related field

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

As a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, you’ll lead the design of critical subassemblies of our products and work closely with team members from our hardware, software, and product teams to help us realize our vision of full home autonomy.

If you’re passionate about great design and obsessed with getting the details right, we’d love to talk to you about how you can work with us to pioneer innovations in the home robotics space.

What you'll do

• Own a critical subsystem end to end: requirements, architecture, detailed design, validation, tooling, and ramp
• Turn a vague product goal into a set of engineering requirements and defend the ones that matter when they conflict
• Make and own tradeoffs across cost, mass, acoustics, serviceability, manufacturability, and reliability, and explain the reasoning to people outside your discipline
• Own the tolerance budget for the full assembly, not just individual stacks
• Decide where to spend analysis, where to spend test, and where to just build it
• Drive suppliers from tooling kickoff through T1 and T2 to a qualified process, and hold the line on quality when the schedule pushes back
• Own the failure investigations in your area, from field returns back to root cause and corrective action
• Raise the technical level of the engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the standard you set on your own drawings

What we look for

Evidence of independent technical judgment at subsystem scale:

• A subsystem you owned that shipped in volume, where you can walk through the architecture decisions, what you rejected, and what you got wrong
• You've been through at least one full production ramp and can talk about what broke between T1 and mass production
• Deep command of high volume manufacturing, particularly injection molding, at the level of tool design conversations with a supplier
• You've built a tolerance and variation strategy for an assembly, including how you decided what to control and what to leave open
• Test design judgment: you've built accelerated test plans that correlated to field data, and you know when an acceleration model does not apply
• You've made a call under uncertainty, been wrong, caught it, and fixed it. We will ask about this
• You are still hands-on. Tell us the last thing you personally built, measured, or debugged yourself rather than delegating
• You've owned something outside your discipline because the company needed it done and you were the one available
• You make other engineers better without needing a title to do it
• Comfort in a fast-paced startup where you are the escalation point, not the escalator

A technical degree in mechanical engineering or related field. Most people who can do this job have 5+ years of professional design experience on shipping high volume products, but we hire on demonstrated capability. If you're earlier in your career and can show the above.

Experience in NVH, motors, or turbo motors is a plus.

Engineering Culture at Matic

Seniority at Matic means both more depth and more range, not just one of the two. Nobody graduates out of the hands-on work.

When it's needed, we're all still on late evening supplier calls. We're still in the lab at 9pm when a life test fails three days before a build. You'll redline your own drawings, tear down your own returns, build your own fixtures, and dig through your own data. Owning a subsystem end to end means every part of it is yours, including the parts that feel tedious and repetitive right up until the moment they save the program.

The senior engineers who do best here go deepest into that work, because that's where the problems actually live. Architecture and direction matter, but they hold up only when the person making the calls has recent dirt under their fingernails. Concept and R&D are the fun half. Production, tolerancing, reliability, and supplier management are the half that tells you whether the fun half was any good. We keep them together on purpose.

The same goes past your own scope. A blocked build, a broken test rig, a supplier issue in someone else's area, a question nobody quite owns: people here move toward those. Scope is how we plan the work, not how we decide what's ours.

That's the shape of the team we're building. We value deep expertise in people who'd like to join Matic. At the same time, the engineers 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 of your normal comfort zones
• You love diagnosing complex technical issues
• You are excited to do great work

Compensation:

Base: $160,000 - $240,000 per annum.
Actual Compensation will depend on skills, experience and qualifications. Base Salary is one part of the total compensation package. The role is also eligible for equity through the company’s discretionary equity program, along with a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage access to a 401(k) plan.