Senior Mechanical Engineer (Robotics/Manipulation)

Starpilot · Brooklyn, NY · Full-time, on-site

About Starpilot

Starpilot is a venture-backed startup building new forms of precision robotics for high-demand industrial applications. We are a Physical AI company, designing our tools around robust data collection operations and procedures to ensure our tools can be used with the latest robot models. We design, machine, and iterate on our core products from data collection devices and industrial manipulation tools in-house in our Brooklyn office and have a global team ready to scale production on any given design.

We're a small team of engineers and PhD researchers (Columbia, MIT Media Lab, Johns Hopkins) backed by several of the largest VCs in industry and led by repeat entrepreneurs. We prioritize deployment realities over simulation or theory, and we're looking for experienced engineers who can turn novel robotic concepts into reliable, production-ready systems at scale.

The Role

You'll own the mechanical engineering lifecycle of the industrial-grade manipulators and data collection devices at the heart of our products, from early-stage prototypes to robust designs deployed across hundreds or thousands of units. You'll work closely with our PhD research team to translate novel manipulation concepts into manufacturable, reliable hardware that performs consistently under demanding industrial conditions.

This role goes beyond designing mechanisms that work in a prototype. You'll anticipate real-world failure modes, investigate unexpected mechanical behavior, and develop the engineering solutions needed to make hardware reliable, repeatable, and scalable. You'll establish the design practices, validation procedures, and documentation that enable our products to transition from a handful of prototypes to large-scale deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own the full hardware lifecycle: Lead mechanical design from concept and rapid prototyping through design validation, productionization, and scaling to hundreds or thousands of units.
• Drive production scaling: Establish repeatable manufacturing and assembly processes, resolve production issues, improve yield, and maintain consistent performance and quality across production runs.
• Engineer for real-world operating conditions: Identify and address edge cases involving unintended mechanical loading, fatigue, vibration, resonance, wear, tolerance stack-ups, and other sources of failure in industrial automation.
• Lead failure analysis and root-cause investigation: Diagnose mechanical failures and unexpected behavior using first-principles analysis, physical testing, instrumentation, and computational tools. Document findings and implement corrective actions that prevent recurrence.
• Design for reliability and longevity: Translate operating requirements, duty cycles, load cases, and environmental conditions into robust designs with appropriate safety factors, service life, and performance margins.
• Validate designs rigorously: Develop and execute qualification, endurance, fatigue, vibration, and stress tests as appropriate to establish performance limits and validate reliability under realistic operating conditions.
• Drive design for manufacturing and assembly (DFM/DFA): Optimize geometries, tolerances, materials, and manufacturing processes to improve repeatability, simplify assembly, reduce costs, and minimize production variability.
• Own production documentation: Develop and maintain production-ready CAD, engineering drawings, GD&T, bills of materials, assembly instructions, test procedures, and engineering change documentation.
• Work with suppliers and manufacturing partners: Collaborate on process development, tooling, component qualification, quality control, and troubleshooting to ensure designs can be manufactured reliably at scale.
• Lead cross-functional development: Work across mechanical, electrical, controls, and research teams to resolve system-level issues and ensure robotic hardware performs reliably in its intended application.
• Establish engineering standards: Build systematic practices for design reviews, validation, failure reporting, and continuous improvement as the company scales.

Qualifications

• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering or a closely related field, with substantial relevant industry experience.
• Required: Demonstrated experience taking mechanical hardware from prototype through product and scaling to hundreds or thousands of units. You have directly owned or played a leading engineering role in this transition, including manufacturing, reliability, and field issues.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, testing, and deploying mechanical systems in industrial automation, robotics, machinery, or other demanding electromechanical applications.
• Strong fundamentals in mechanical design, materials, mechanisms, structural mechanics, and manufacturing processes.
• Proven experience analyzing and mitigating mechanical failure modes, including fatigue, vibration, resonance, unintended loading, wear, and tolerance-related issues.
• Ability to systematically investigate failures, determine root causes, document findings, and translate them into effective design improvements.
• Practical experience with engineering analysis methods such as hand calculations, stress and fatigue analysis, finite element analysis (FEA), vibration analysis, and experimental validation.
• Strong CAD skills and experience producing production-ready engineering drawings, GD&T, and detailed manufacturing specifications.
• Experience with DFM/DFA, supplier collaboration, manufacturing process development, and production quality control.
• Track record of making sound engineering trade-offs across performance, reliability, manufacturability, cost, and production throughput.
• Strong technical communication skills, including clear documentation of engineering decisions, failure analyses, and validation results.
• Able to work in person in Brooklyn and thrive in a fast-paced, hands-on startup environment.

What We're Looking For

We want an engineer who has seen what happens when a design leaves the lab and encounters the real world, and who has personally helped turn prototypes into products manufactured and deployed at scale.

You understand that getting a mechanism to work once is only the beginning. You know how to engineer for manufacturing variability, unexpected loads, long-term fatigue, vibration, and the edge cases that emerge after thousands of operating cycles. When something fails, you can move from a broken component to a root-cause analysis, a documented corrective action, and a validated design improvement.

You're equally comfortable developing a new mechanism, analyzing a difficult mechanical problem, working directly with manufacturing partners, and establishing the processes needed to produce reliable hardware at scale. You take ownership beyond the initial design and care about how the product performs throughout its operational life. Above all, you bring the practical judgment and engineering rigor to make novel robotic hardware reliable, manufacturable, and ready for real-world deployment.