Mechanical Engineer

About Bracket Bot

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.

The Mandate

Design the robot so it can be built, repaired, improved, and shipped fast.

This 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.

At 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.

You 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.

The best person for this role wants the full loop: sketch, CAD, print or machine, assemble, debug, break, measure, simplify, source, document, and ship.

Role At A Glance

• Reports to: Founder / CEO and founding engineering team

• Location: San Francisco, in person

• Core job: Own mechanical design and build path for a low-cost developer robot

• Scope: CAD, mechanisms, actuation, structure, thermal and cable routing, assembly, fixtures, BOM cost, suppliers, testing, and production feedback

• Best fit: A high-ownership builder with excellent mechanical judgment who can make robots better at the bench and cheaper in production

What You Will Own

• Mechanical architecture: Design the structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, service panels, and assemblies that make the robot capable, approachable, and manufacturable.

• Actuation and mechanisms: Work on motors, servos, transmissions, bushings, bearings, horns, sleeves, springs, stiffness, backlash, load paths, and the practical details that make motion reliable.

• Packaging and integration: Package cameras, cables, PCBs, fans, heatsinks, connectors, power, compute, sensors, and fasteners so the robot can be assembled, serviced, and iterated quickly.

• Prototype-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.

• DFM, 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.

• Test 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.

• Cross-functional hardware work: Collaborate tightly with electrical, robotics software, autonomy, and operations so algorithms, boards, harnesses, calibration, and physical design improve together.

• Mechanical 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.

First 90 Days

In your first 90 days, you should expect to:

• Build and tear down the current robot until you understand the real assembly flow, failure modes, cost drivers, and service pain points.

• Own 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.

• Create a mechanical roadmap for the next robot revision: what gets cheaper, stronger, easier to assemble, easier to repair, and less likely to fail.

• Tighten the CAD, BOM, drawing, and release process enough that parts, suppliers, and robot builds stay in sync.

• Stand up simple tests for the failure modes that matter most: thermal, cable strain, repeated motion, impacts, joint wear, and assembly variation.

• Work with EE on connector, PCB, power, thermal, and packaging constraints, and with software on calibration, collisions, serviceability, and developer-facing reliability.

What Will Make You Great

• You have strong mechanical fundamentals: mechanisms, structures, materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes, and first-principles tradeoffs.

• You 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.

• You 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.

• 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.

• You 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.

• You 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.

• You 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.

This May Not Be A Fit If

• You want a CAD-only role where other people build and debug the hardware.

• You need mature company systems, clean requirements, and a large mechanical team before you can be effective.

• You prefer optimizing one beautiful prototype over making dozens or hundreds of robots easier to build.

• You are not interested in BOM cost, suppliers, fixtures, assembly time, cable routing, fasteners, or the unglamorous details that decide whether hardware ships.

• You want to stay far from software, electrical engineering, customers, or the physical mess of early production.

Why This Is Rare

Robotics companies usually fail because the full system is too hard: hardware, software, autonomy, manufacturing, safety, customers, and cost all have to work at once.

Bracket 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.

As 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.

This is a role for someone who wants to make real machines exist in the world, not just design them.

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. The best signal is real hardware: CAD, robots, mechanisms, vehicles, fixtures, teardown notes, manufacturing work, competition robots, shipped products, or anything that shows how you think when a physical system has to work.

Bracket 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.