Mechanical Design Engineer (Robots)

Who we are

Autonomous is a US company with offices in Vietnam, New York, and California. We make AI hardware. This year, robots are our main focus.

The product & the role

We are building Lamp — one of the first robots we ever made. It is alive, and it lives in people's homes. Most robots are toys you drive with an app; ours is different. Lamp is a small desk robot with a moving arm, a face made of light, a voice, and a memory of your day.

Our dream: the first living, breathing, autonomous, sensor-driven robot — in the beautiful form of a lamp. You own the body. You start with Lamp, then build the next one. Nobody hands you a finished drawing set. Software decides what the robot thinks; you decide how it moves and how it feels.

Scope of work

• The body of LAMP. Redesign the enclosure for injection molding — draft, even wall thickness, gate and knit line positions, and keeping sink and ejector marks off the surfaces people see. Work with the mold vendor through the trials until the samples are right.

• The moving parts. Make the five joints accurate, quiet and long-lasting: stiffness, backlash, torque margin, hard
  stops, and running cables through joints that rotate.

• Structure, heat and sound. Keep it stable when the head moves. Cool it without a fan. Stop servo noise from reaching the microphones.

• Cost and assembly. Fewer parts, simpler fasteners, the right jigs, and a build sequence a line operator can follow.

• Quality and testing. Tolerance stack-ups, colours that match between batches, and testing for drop, vibration,
  packaging and joint life.

• Experience designing physical products, with at least one that was actually made and sold.
• Good physics and maths — you can calculate loads, stiffness, torque and heat, not just draw a shape and hope it holds.
• Strong 3D CAD (SolidWorks, Creo, Fusion 360, Inventor, NX or similar) and tolerance stack-ups.
• Real depth in at least one manufacturing process — injection molding and tooling, or sheet metal, weldments and steel fabrication.
• CNC programming, so you can machine your own parts and get to a prototype in days rather than weeks. Designing for cost and assembly time, not only for function (DFM / DFA).
• Time on the shop floor, not only in the CAD.
• AI-native — you use AI in your daily work, from checking calculations and comparing design options to writing scripts that speed up CAD and CNC tasks. We build AI hardware, and we expect you to work that way.