- Job title
- Mechanical Design Engineer, Mechanisms
- Job location
- San Francisco, CA
- Job description
- ### **Join Us, and Ship Robots**
Weave was founded to build the robots we’d want to have in our own home. We believe the next generation of robotics will transform everyday life by enabling people to do more and to reclaim time to spend on what’s important.
We also believe robots are in a sense like any other product: to matter, they have to ship. Our robots are already operating in real homes and businesses, giving us the opportunity to rapidly improve from real-world experience. With a growing team, strong customer demand, and capital for expansion, we’re entering an exciting stage of growth—and we’re looking for people with exceptional talent and standards to help bring home robotics to millions of households.
### **The Role**
Weave is building and deploying some of the first bimanual robots to operate in customer homes. Designing mechanisms for the home presents a demanding optimization problem: balancing capability, size, weight, safety, cost, and durability across an enormous range of tasks and operating conditions. As a Mechanical Design Engineer at Weave, you’ll design the articulated mechanisms that give our robots many of their physical capabilities, from multi-DOF manipulators, to remotely actuated limbs, to grippers, to articulated necks. Because we vertically integrate much of our robot, you’ll have unusual freedom to optimize the complete electromechanical system rather than treating actuators, electronics, and mechanical structures as fixed constraints.
### **Responsibilities**
- **Design articulated robotic mechanisms:** Architect and develop multi-DOF joints, manipulators, grippers, linkages, and other actuated assemblies.
- **Design for the real world:** Engineer mechanisms to withstand repeated contact, impacts, unexpected loading, wear, contamination, and other conditions that arise outside controlled laboratory environments.
- **Own designs end-to-end:** Take mechanisms from requirements and early concepts through CAD, analysis, prototyping, testing, design iteration, and production release.
- **Engineer for performance:** Balance torque, speed, stiffness, backlash, efficiency, mass, inertia, thermal performance, durability, and cost to achieve system-level performance targets.
- **Analyze and validate designs:** Use first-principles calculations, FEA, tolerance analysis, and physical testing to understand loads, failure modes, structural performance, and mechanism life.
- **Design at the system level:** Work closely with controls, electrical, embedded, and industrial design to optimize mechanisms around the needs of the entire robot—not just the requirements of an individual assembly. You’ll own some of the mechanisms that most directly define what our robots can do.
### **What You'll Bring**
- **Articulated mechanism experience:** 3+ years designing actuated (or equivalent research experience), multi-DOF electromechanical systems such as robotic arms, manipulators, grippers, dexterous mechanisms, exoskeletons, or similar articulated machinery.
- **Strong mechanical design fundamentals:** Deep understanding of motors, gearboxes, bearings, shafts, fasteners, linkages, springs, structural design, friction, wear, backlash, and mechanical power transmission.
- **CAD & detailed design:** Expert proficiency in Onshape, SolidWorks, Creo, or similar, including complex assemblies, drawings, GD&T, tolerance analysis, and configuration management.
- **Actuator & transmission design:** Experience selecting and integrating BLDC motors, harmonic drives/strain-wave gearing, planetary gearboxes, belt/cable drives, cycloidal drives, or similar transmission technologies.
- **Mechanical analysis:** Strong command of free-body diagrams, load cases, stress and deflection analysis, fatigue, stiffness, inertia, and mechanism dynamics.
- **Production design:** Experience designing mechanical assemblies for manufacturing processes such as CNC machining, injection molding, die casting, sheet metal, or additive manufacturing.
- **Hands-on engineering:** Comfortable assembling, instrumenting, testing, and debugging mechanisms rather than treating CAD release as the end of the design process.
### **Nice to Have**
- Experience designing integrated actuators.
- Experience with accelerated life testing (ALT), HALT, cycle testing, shock/drop testing, DFMEA, or other reliability engineering methods.
- Experience designing around cable routing, flex circuits, slip rings, or other power/signal routing challenges through articulated joints.
- Experience taking complex electromechanical assemblies through EVT/DVT/PVT and into volume production.
