Mechanical Design Engineer

Mechanical Design Engineer
San Francisco • Onsite • Full-time

About Bracket Bot

We believe planet earth can thrive and be alive. Robots should manufacture goods, clean roadways, tidy our rooms, build more homes, cook healthy food, and lower the cost of living. We aren't quite there yet, robots are too expensive, too difficult to program, fragile, and unfriendly. Bracket Bot is changing that.

We believe that robots are currently in the ENIAC era and we are bringing them to the Macbook era. We believe in high performance engineering teams where everyone you work with is what you imagined Bell Labs employees to be like. Intelligent, scrappy, dedicated, kind.

At Bracket Bot, we have a few objectives. We are working to make the ideal role model of a company, one where everyone is at the top of their field, inventing new ways to solve the problems we face across mechanical, electrical, software, and machine learning. What does a company that creates entirely new ways that teams work together look like? A company that invents new materials for lighter weight actuators and structures? A company that creates and publishes new inverse kinematics algorithms for robots? A company that is thinking radically differently, and executing on another level.

In every field there are small teams who did something their peers had decided was impossible. The 10-second barrier in sprinting, or the eight engineers who left Motorola and made the 6502 for 10x lower cost than other chips at the time making the personal computer possible. SpaceX has landed the same rocket 36 times. Bracket Bot believes actuated, alive machines can be glorious, affordable, easy to use, and ubiquitous, and we are pulling that future forward.

Our products are a mirror of what we think about the world, on engineering & research, and what we think should be introduced into the world. In history, there are simply products that should exist, and only once created, are obvious in hindsight. Bracket Bot's mission is to introduce as many of these products into the world as possible. We believe there are hundreds of these in the space of robotics. Across physical robot hardware, software and operating system; the infrastructure and distributed systems they connect to; the AI inference they run, both local and cloud, and so much more.

Our first product, Bracket Bot 1, exemplifies what a small team of highly talented people can do. At Bracket Bot, we genuinely believe 100x engineers exist, and a room full of them can create things that dozens of other companies have failed to do. We've brought to market a robot that is 10x lower cost than any other robot in its category, while out performing them on manipulation, autonomous navigation, speech interaction, and developer UX.

We're backed by Fifty Years (Scott Phoenix), BoxGroup, SV Angel, Betaworks, Pace Capital, angels including Nat Friedman, Logan Kilpatrick (Google AI), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) and others from Tesla AI, Physical Intelligence, and Markforged.

About the role

Our robot's mechanical design determines how it moves, how reliably it works, and how easily we can build and repair it.

We're hiring a Mechanical Design Engineer to own mechanical systems from the first sketch through CAD, prototypes, testing, supplier feedback, and production. You'll work across structures, arms, joints, actuation, packaging, and assembly to make each robot more capable, affordable, and reliable.

This is a hands-on role. You'll build and debug the hardware yourself, working closely with electrical, robotics software, and operations to turn tested designs into robots we can ship.

What you'll do

• Design robot structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, and assemblies.
• Work through actuation details including stiffness, backlash, bearings, bushings, springs, and load paths.
• Package sensors, compute, PCBs, cooling, connectors, and cables for fast assembly and service.
• Move designs from CAD to printed, machined, or sourced parts, then assemble, measure, test, and iterate.
• Simplify parts and assembly steps, reduce BOM cost, and work with suppliers on materials, processes, and tolerances.
• Build fixtures and practical reliability tests for wear, repeated motion, heat, impacts, and cable strain.
• Keep CAD, drawings, BOMs, part revisions, and build documentation aligned.

What we're looking for

• Strong mechanical fundamentals across mechanisms, structures, materials, tolerances, and manufacturing.
• Evidence of real electromechanical systems you've designed, built, and debugged.
• Strong CAD skills and comfort working at the bench.
• Good judgment about cost, reliability, assembly, and serviceability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into tested hardware and explain tradeoffs across disciplines.

Nice to have

• Robotics, actuation, or mechanism design experience.
• Experience with fixtures, thermal design, cable routing, or reliability testing.
• Experience taking prototypes into repeatable production and working directly with suppliers.

Important notes

• Founding-team role with major ownership of mechanical architecture and the physical product.
• Hands-on building and fast iteration are central to the job.
• We value evidence of shipped hardware and thoughtful engineering over credentials.

Compensation and how to apply

Competitive cash and meaningful equity for an early founding role. We will tailor the package to the candidate.

Send us a short note and evidence of work you are proud of: CAD, robots, mechanisms, fixtures, manufacturing work, or shipped products that show how you think when a physical system has to work.

Bracket Bot is an equal opportunity employer. We're building a diverse team and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.