Mechanical Engineer

About Phlux

Industrial robots are fast, heavy, and unforgiving, so they get fenced off. The devices that guard them - light curtains, laser scanners, safety mats - mostly protect a flat plane or a patch of floor, which forces a big rectangular cage around the machine, eats floor space, and halts production every time somebody steps too close.

We build a 3D safety sensor that changes the shape of that problem, literally. It monitors a programmable three-dimensional protection zone around a robot, detects in real time when someone enters it, and drives safety outputs wired into the customer's safety controller. Safety itself is table stakes - every plant already has to meet it. What a 3D zone adds is flexibility: cells shaped to the actual work instead of a rectangle, people and robots far closer together, less floor space, and far fewer stoppages.

We're a small, NSF-funded team in Pittsburgh. We've deployed units, tested them with real customers, and have more in front of us - this isn't a research project hunting for an application.

The role

You'd own the mechanical side of the sensor. Not a piece of it - the whole thing.

That means the assembly that holds the optics in alignment, the enclosure around it, the fixtures we test with, the parts we get made and who makes them, and the design work that keeps units repeatable as we scale up. Concretely:

- The master CAD assembly - optical and illumination modules, mounting and alignment, enclosure
- Unit builds: sourcing, assembly, and the written procedures that make them repeatable
- Vendors and BOM - supplier relationships, part numbers, lead times, cost
- Quick-turn test fixtures. Design it Tuesday, print it Wednesday, test it Thursday
- Tolerance and DFM work as we scale production volumes
- Support for laser eye-safety and qualification testing

The team is small enough that you wouldn't be siloed - you'd work alongside the firmware and software people, often on the same problem in the same room. Nothing you design waits in a queue for approval. It gets built - often by you, at the bench - and then you find out whether you were right, which is the fastest way anyone learns this work.

The flip side is that it's rarely handed to you fully specified. A lot of the job is deciding what the problem actually is before you solve it.

What we're looking for

You'll need:

- BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, graduating December 2026 or recently graduated
- Co-op or internship experience - you've worked in a real engineering organization, not just on coursework
- Fluency in CAD. SolidWorks, Fusion, Onshape, NX; we don't care which
- You know how to build things with your hands. Machine shop time - mill, lathe, whatever you've run. Fabrication, assembly, wiring, fitting parts together to a tolerance that actually matters. A CAD model is a proposal; somebody has to make it real, and here that is often going to be you
- Rapid prototyping instincts. You know what prints and what warps, where layer orientation will bite you, and when to print a part versus machine it. A lot of this job is getting a physical part in hand fast enough to actually learn something from it
- The ability to look at a design and see where it goes wrong - where it'll bind, flex, drift, or turn out to be impossible to assemble. Catching that on screen is a lot cheaper than catching it on the bench
- Something you've built that moves. A robot, a drone, a combat bot, an AUV or rocketry team, a printer or CNC you put together yourself, FSAE or Baja, a mechatronics capstone. Something with motors and sensors in it that you had to make actually work

Helpful, not required: optics or photonics coursework, GD&T and stack-up experience, DFM, and any robotics background.

Being straight with you

The scope is wide and the direction is often yours to set. Some people find that the best part of the job. If you'd rather have a defined rotation and a bench of peers doing similar work, this will grate.

The pace cuts both ways. A problem found Tuesday can have a printed part on the bench Thursday - but priorities move, and something you started last week can get reordered by a customer call.

We take process seriously. We're building toward formal third-party safety certification, which means documented design rationale, written procedures, and traceable requirements are part of the daily work rather than a phase tacked on at the end. When a device has to keep behaving correctly even as parts of it fail, that discipline is the work, not paperwork.

Compensation and logistics

Competitive salary based on experience, real equity in the company, an employer contribution toward health coverage, and paid time off plus holidays and a year-end office closure. We'll go through the specifics when we talk.

Full-time, starting January 2027, on-site in Point Breeze - the hardware, the lab, and the shop are here, so this isn't a role that works remotely.

To apply

Send a résumé plus something you've built. Attach it or link it, whichever is easier - photos, CAD screenshots, a PDF, a video of the thing actually moving, a Drive folder, a YouTube link. We're not asking for a portfolio site. We're asking for evidence.

In two sentences: what it does, and what was hard about it.