Founding Mechanical Engineer / Designer

Bracket Bot•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Bracket Bot is building the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for. Useful robots are still too expensive, too closed, too fragile, and too hard to program. We think that changes when great robot hardware becomes cheap enough for developers, labs, startups, and customers to build on top of it the way they build on computers. We are a small San Francisco team building low-cost, general-purpose robots that developers can program and deploy in days. The work is physical and immediate: robots in the office, 7DOF arms, servos, bushings, springs, printed parts, cable routing, thermal constraints, supplier decisions, BOM pressure, assembly bottlenecks, and a product that has to become dramatically easier to build without becoming less capable. Our goal is to build the platform company that helps robotics have its app-store moment. We are backed by Fifty Years, BoxGroup, Betaworks, Pace Capital, Logan Kilpatrick, Mohith Mothukuri, Guillermo Rauch, and other great investors and builders.

Requirements

Strong mechanical fundamentals: mechanisms, structures, materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes, and first-principles tradeoffs.
Use CAD as a thinking tool, but do not stop at CAD.
Experience building real electromechanical systems: robots, arms, drones, vehicles, race cars, manufacturing equipment, medical devices, consumer hardware, lab instruments, or other machines where software meets moving parts.
Comfortable with ambiguity. Can take a messy problem, define the constraints, make the tradeoff, and get to a tested part without waiting for perfect requirements.
Communicate clearly across disciplines.
Move quickly without being casual about quality.
Know when to prototype, when to analyze, when to make a drawing, and when to delete complexity.

Nice To Haves

Like building, measuring, taking things apart, and finding out where the design is lying to you.
Care about cost, assembly, serviceability, and reliability as much as elegance.
The best design is the one we can build repeatedly and keep improving.

Responsibilities

Design the robot so it can be built, repaired, improved, and shipped fast.
Own large parts of the robot's mechanical system from vague requirement to CAD, prototype, assembled robot, test result, supplier feedback, and the next revision.
Design the structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, service panels, and assemblies that make the robot capable, approachable, and manufacturable.
Work on motors, servos, transmissions, bushings, bearings, horns, sleeves, springs, stiffness, backlash, load paths, and the practical details that make motion reliable.
Package cameras, cables, PCBs, fans, heatsinks, connectors, power, compute, sensors, and fasteners so the robot can be assembled, serviced, and iterated quickly.
Move from CAD to printed, machined, or sourced parts; assemble robots yourself; debug failures; update drawings, BOMs, and release notes; then do it again.
Simplify parts, reduce assembly time, choose processes and materials, create fixtures and jigs, talk to suppliers, and make cost and reliability visible in every design decision.
Build practical tests for wear, cable failures, heat, impacts, backlash, cycle life, serviceability, and the ways real robots fail outside a clean CAD model.
Collaborate tightly with electrical, robotics software, autonomy, and operations so algorithms, boards, harnesses, calibration, and physical design improve together.
Help set the standard for CAD hygiene, drawings, part numbering, prototype logs, design reviews, and the lightweight systems a tiny hardware team needs to move fast without losing the thread.