{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"d65cb35d2f22700ce0c4d0b6","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/d65cb35d2f22700ce0c4d0b6","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/d65cb35d2f22700ce0c4d0b6","title":"Founding Mechanical Engineer / Designer","description":"About Bracket Bot\nBracket Bot is building the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for.\n\nUseful 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nOur 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.\n\nThe Mandate\nDesign the robot so it can be built, repaired, improved, and shipped fast.\n\nThis is not a CAD-only role and not a narrow mechanical analysis role. You will 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.\n\nAt Bracket Bot, mechanical design directly determines whether developers can actually build useful robotics applications. The robot has to be approachable, low-cost, robust enough for real use, safe around people, serviceable by a small team, and simple enough to assemble in batches without heroics.\n\nYou will work across robot structure, arms, joints, actuation, sensor and compute packaging, cable routing, thermal design, covers, fixtures, tolerances, part sourcing, assembly flow, and the messy handoff from prototype to production.\n\nThe best person for this role wants the full loop: sketch, CAD, print or machine, assemble, debug, break, measure, simplify, source, document, and ship.\n\nRole At A Glance\n\nReports to: Founder / CEO and founding engineering team\n\nLocation: San Francisco, in person\n\nCore job: Own mechanical design and build path for a low-cost developer robot\n\nScope: CAD, mechanisms, actuation, structure, thermal and cable routing, assembly, fixtures, BOM cost, suppliers, testing, and production feedback\n\nBest fit: A high-ownership builder with excellent mechanical judgment who can make robots better at the bench and cheaper in production\n\nWhat You Will Own\n\nMechanical architecture: Design the structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, service panels, and assemblies that make the robot capable, approachable, and manufacturable.\n\nActuation and mechanisms: Work on motors, servos, transmissions, bushings, bearings, horns, sleeves, springs, stiffness, backlash, load paths, and the practical details that make motion reliable.\n\nPackaging and integration: Package cameras, cables, PCBs, fans, heatsinks, connectors, power, compute, sensors, and fasteners so the robot can be assembled, serviced, and iterated quickly.\n\nPrototype-to-production loop: Move from CAD to printed, machined, or sourced parts; assemble robots yourself; debug failures; update drawings, BOMs, and release notes; then do it again.\n\nDFM, DFA, and cost: 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.\n\nTest and reliability: Build practical tests for wear, cable failures, heat, impacts, backlash, cycle life, serviceability, and the ways real robots fail outside a clean CAD model.\n\nCross-functional hardware work: Collaborate tightly with electrical, robotics software, autonomy, and operations so algorithms, boards, harnesses, calibration, and physical design improve together.\n\nMechanical culture: 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.\n\nFirst 90 Days\nIn your first 90 days, you should expect to:\n\nBuild and tear down the current robot until you understand the real assembly flow, failure modes, cost drivers, and service pain points.\n\nOwn two or three immediate mechanical improvements from CAD to tested robot. Examples might include cable routing, wrist camera packaging, cooling, bushing and sleeve tolerances, servo mounting, arm stiffness, covers, fixtures, or assembly simplification.\n\nCreate a mechanical roadmap for the next robot revision: what gets cheaper, stronger, easier to assemble, easier to repair, and less likely to fail.\n\nTighten the CAD, BOM, drawing, and release process enough that parts, suppliers, and robot builds stay in sync.\n\nStand up simple tests for the failure modes that matter most: thermal, cable strain, repeated motion, impacts, joint wear, and assembly variation.\n\nWork with EE on connector, PCB, power, thermal, and packaging constraints, and with software on calibration, collisions, serviceability, and developer-facing reliability.\n\nWhat Will Make You Great\n\nYou have strong mechanical fundamentals: mechanisms, structures, materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes, and first-principles tradeoffs.\n\nYou use CAD as a thinking tool, but you do not stop at CAD. You like building, measuring, taking things apart, and finding out where the design is lying to you.\n\nYou have built 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.\n\nYou care about cost, assembly, serviceability, and reliability as much as elegance. The best design is the one we can build repeatedly and keep improving.\n\nYou are comfortable with ambiguity. You can take a messy problem, define the constraints, make the tradeoff, and get to a tested part without waiting for perfect requirements.\n\nYou communicate clearly across disciplines. You can explain a tolerance issue to software, a cable issue to EE, a supplier issue to ops, and a design tradeoff to the whole team.\n\nYou move quickly without being casual about quality. You know when to prototype, when to analyze, when to make a drawing, and when to delete complexity.\n\nThis May Not Be A Fit If\n\nYou want a CAD-only role where other people build and debug the hardware.\n\nYou need mature company systems, clean requirements, and a large mechanical team before you can be effective.\n\nYou prefer optimizing one beautiful prototype over making dozens or hundreds of robots easier to build.\n\nYou are not interested in BOM cost, suppliers, fixtures, assembly time, cable routing, fasteners, or the unglamorous details that decide whether hardware ships.\n\nYou want to stay far from software, electrical engineering, customers, or the physical mess of early production.\n\nWhy This Is Rare\nRobotics companies usually fail because the full system is too hard: hardware, software, autonomy, manufacturing, safety, customers, and cost all have to work at once.\n\nBracket Bot is trying to make that system dramatically simpler and cheaper, then open it up to developers. If we are right, the important thing is not one robot. It is thousands of people being able to build useful robotics applications without first spending years building hardware from scratch.\n\nAs Founding Mechanical Engineer / Designer, you will help define the physical platform that makes that possible. Your work will show up in every robot we build: how it moves, how it feels, how it survives, how it gets assembled, how fast we can improve it, and whether the next developer can trust it enough to build on top of it.\n\nThis is a role for someone who wants to make real machines exist in the world, not just design them.\n\nCompensation\nCompetitive cash and meaningful equity for an early founding role. We will tailor the package to the candidate.\n\nBracket Bot is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds who are excited to help build the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for.\n\n#J-18808-Ljbffr","company":"Bracket Bot","rawCompany":"bracket bot","city":"Millbrae","state":"CA","isRemote":false,"isActive":true,"createdAt":"2026-06-20T04:15:33.932Z","occupations":[{"code":"17-2199.08","title":"Robotics Engineers","slug":"robotics-engineers"},{"code":"17-2141.00","title":"Mechanical Engineers","slug":"mechanical-engineers"},{"code":"17-2199.05","title":"Mechatronics Engineers","slug":"mechatronics-engineers"}],"industries":[{"code":"333248","title":"All Other Industrial Machinery Manufacturing","slug":"all-other-industrial-machinery-manufacturing"},{"code":"333922","title":"Conveyor and Conveying Equipment Manufacturing","slug":"conveyor-and-conveying-equipment-manufacturing"},{"code":"333993","title":"Packaging Machinery Manufacturing","slug":"packaging-machinery-manufacturing"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Founding Mechanical Engineer / Designer","description":"About Bracket Bot\nBracket Bot is building the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for.\n\nUseful 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nOur 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.\n\nThe Mandate\nDesign the robot so it can be built, repaired, improved, and shipped fast.\n\nThis is not a CAD-only role and not a narrow mechanical analysis role. You will 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.\n\nAt Bracket Bot, mechanical design directly determines whether developers can actually build useful robotics applications. The robot has to be approachable, low-cost, robust enough for real use, safe around people, serviceable by a small team, and simple enough to assemble in batches without heroics.\n\nYou will work across robot structure, arms, joints, actuation, sensor and compute packaging, cable routing, thermal design, covers, fixtures, tolerances, part sourcing, assembly flow, and the messy handoff from prototype to production.\n\nThe best person for this role wants the full loop: sketch, CAD, print or machine, assemble, debug, break, measure, simplify, source, document, and ship.\n\nRole At A Glance\n\nReports to: Founder / CEO and founding engineering team\n\nLocation: San Francisco, in person\n\nCore job: Own mechanical design and build path for a low-cost developer robot\n\nScope: CAD, mechanisms, actuation, structure, thermal and cable routing, assembly, fixtures, BOM cost, suppliers, testing, and production feedback\n\nBest fit: A high-ownership builder with excellent mechanical judgment who can make robots better at the bench and cheaper in production\n\nWhat You Will Own\n\nMechanical architecture: Design the structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, service panels, and assemblies that make the robot capable, approachable, and manufacturable.\n\nActuation and mechanisms: Work on motors, servos, transmissions, bushings, bearings, horns, sleeves, springs, stiffness, backlash, load paths, and the practical details that make motion reliable.\n\nPackaging and integration: Package cameras, cables, PCBs, fans, heatsinks, connectors, power, compute, sensors, and fasteners so the robot can be assembled, serviced, and iterated quickly.\n\nPrototype-to-production loop: Move from CAD to printed, machined, or sourced parts; assemble robots yourself; debug failures; update drawings, BOMs, and release notes; then do it again.\n\nDFM, DFA, and cost: 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.\n\nTest and reliability: Build practical tests for wear, cable failures, heat, impacts, backlash, cycle life, serviceability, and the ways real robots fail outside a clean CAD model.\n\nCross-functional hardware work: Collaborate tightly with electrical, robotics software, autonomy, and operations so algorithms, boards, harnesses, calibration, and physical design improve together.\n\nMechanical culture: 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.\n\nFirst 90 Days\nIn your first 90 days, you should expect to:\n\nBuild and tear down the current robot until you understand the real assembly flow, failure modes, cost drivers, and service pain points.\n\nOwn two or three immediate mechanical improvements from CAD to tested robot. Examples might include cable routing, wrist camera packaging, cooling, bushing and sleeve tolerances, servo mounting, arm stiffness, covers, fixtures, or assembly simplification.\n\nCreate a mechanical roadmap for the next robot revision: what gets cheaper, stronger, easier to assemble, easier to repair, and less likely to fail.\n\nTighten the CAD, BOM, drawing, and release process enough that parts, suppliers, and robot builds stay in sync.\n\nStand up simple tests for the failure modes that matter most: thermal, cable strain, repeated motion, impacts, joint wear, and assembly variation.\n\nWork with EE on connector, PCB, power, thermal, and packaging constraints, and with software on calibration, collisions, serviceability, and developer-facing reliability.\n\nWhat Will Make You Great\n\nYou have strong mechanical fundamentals: mechanisms, structures, materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes, and first-principles tradeoffs.\n\nYou use CAD as a thinking tool, but you do not stop at CAD. You like building, measuring, taking things apart, and finding out where the design is lying to you.\n\nYou have built 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.\n\nYou care about cost, assembly, serviceability, and reliability as much as elegance. The best design is the one we can build repeatedly and keep improving.\n\nYou are comfortable with ambiguity. You can take a messy problem, define the constraints, make the tradeoff, and get to a tested part without waiting for perfect requirements.\n\nYou communicate clearly across disciplines. You can explain a tolerance issue to software, a cable issue to EE, a supplier issue to ops, and a design tradeoff to the whole team.\n\nYou move quickly without being casual about quality. You know when to prototype, when to analyze, when to make a drawing, and when to delete complexity.\n\nThis May Not Be A Fit If\n\nYou want a CAD-only role where other people build and debug the hardware.\n\nYou need mature company systems, clean requirements, and a large mechanical team before you can be effective.\n\nYou prefer optimizing one beautiful prototype over making dozens or hundreds of robots easier to build.\n\nYou are not interested in BOM cost, suppliers, fixtures, assembly time, cable routing, fasteners, or the unglamorous details that decide whether hardware ships.\n\nYou want to stay far from software, electrical engineering, customers, or the physical mess of early production.\n\nWhy This Is Rare\nRobotics companies usually fail because the full system is too hard: hardware, software, autonomy, manufacturing, safety, customers, and cost all have to work at once.\n\nBracket Bot is trying to make that system dramatically simpler and cheaper, then open it up to developers. If we are right, the important thing is not one robot. It is thousands of people being able to build useful robotics applications without first spending years building hardware from scratch.\n\nAs Founding Mechanical Engineer / Designer, you will help define the physical platform that makes that possible. Your work will show up in every robot we build: how it moves, how it feels, how it survives, how it gets assembled, how fast we can improve it, and whether the next developer can trust it enough to build on top of it.\n\nThis is a role for someone who wants to make real machines exist in the world, not just design them.\n\nCompensation\nCompetitive cash and meaningful equity for an early founding role. We will tailor the package to the candidate.\n\nBracket Bot is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds who are excited to help build the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for.\n\n#J-18808-Ljbffr","datePosted":"2026-06-20T04:15:33.932Z","dateModified":"2026-06-20T04:15:33.932Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Bracket Bot","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Millbrae","addressRegion":"CA","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"d65cb35d2f22700ce0c4d0b6"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/d65cb35d2f22700ce0c4d0b6"}}