Technical Team Lead/Staff Manufacturing Equipment Design Engineer - Series Production Testers

Job Description

Job Responsibilities

• Lead the mechanical design of ATE (automated test equipment) for series production: fixtures, nest/locate/clamp schemes, safety covers, pneumatics, motion, frames, and the mechanical interface to electrical and software.
• Take designs from first principles through concept, detailed CAD, drawing release, fabrication, assembly, debug, FAT (factory acceptance test), SAT (site acceptance test), and ramp on the line.
• Stay on the floor. Build, align, rework, and debug with your own hands when the machine is not yet right.
• Own the mechanical deliverables of the design engineers on the team: review models and drawings, set locating and GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) standards, and stop weak designs before they reach the shop.
• Teach. Walk teammates through your locating scheme, stack-up, material choice, and what you would change next time. Knowledge that stays in one head is a failure mode on this team.
• Drive DFM (design for manufacture), DFA (design for assembly), DFMEA (design failure mode and effects analysis), and reliability of the tester as production equipment: cycle time, repeatability, maintainability, spare strategy, and what happens after 10,000 cycles.
• Coordinate mechanical work with electrical, software, controls, process, and production. You choose methods on new assignments; you do not wait for a playbook.
• Run design reviews, RFQ (request for quotation) packages, vendor follow-up, and buyoff. You are accountable for the machine, not only the CAD file.
• Keep testers in series healthy: root-cause mechanical failures, design the durable fix, and feed it back into the next revision.

Job Requirements

• Degree in mechanical engineering, mechatronics, or equivalent, plus typically 6–10 years designing manufacturing equipment (minimum about 5 years of actual machine design, not adjacent work).
• Proven equipment design. You have designed and released manufacturing machines, fixtures, or automated test equipment: frames, precision location, clamping, pneumatics/hydraulics, and the drawing pack the shop built from.
• Expert SolidWorks (or equivalent 3D CAD used at that depth): assemblies you can open and walk, mates, configurations, drawings, GD&T, datums, tolerance stack-up. You can read a part drawing and explain how the fixture locates to it.
• Mechanical fundamentals you can use under pressure: materials, fabrication (machining, sheet metal, weldments, 80/20 and custom), stress/strain, fasteners, bearings, bushings, springs, shock absorbers, poka-yoke.
• Hands-on. You have assembled, aligned, and debugged equipment you designed. You are willing to pick up tools on the tester.
• You have already owned other engineers’ mechanical deliverables — review, coaching, and technical direction — not only your own CAD.
• You want to share how you design. You will sit with the other mechanical engineers, review their models, and raise their level.
• Comfortable as IC team lead: prioritize work, set the mechanical standard, represent the team to production and peer groups, and still ship your own designs.
• English required; German is a plus.
• Willing to work in production lines.

Nice to have

• Automated test equipment or end-of-line testers in high-volume automotive, electronics, or similar.
• FEA (finite element analysis) used to decide a real design.
• AutoCAD Electrical or the discipline to work cleanly with electrical packaging and wire routing.
• FAT/SAT, equipment design/deployment process, vendor build-to-print.
• Pneumatics, light motion, and safety (covers, interlocks, ergonomics) as part of the mechanical design.