Founding Mechatronics Engineer

Company Description

At Kovari, we're rethinking how physical work gets done in the age of robotics. We believe building robots that can move the economy is one of the most important endeavors in technology.

Our first goal is to build general-purpose robots for hospitality to take on physical, repetitive work that keeps the hospitality industry operating. The last mile problem for proliferating useful robots into businesses is a first class innovation problem itself. We aim to marry deep commercial understanding with fast paced innovation to create robots that move the industry. Since inception, we have raised over $6M to carry out our mission from industry leading investors.

We are obsessed with rapid iteration, engineering rigor, and deploying real machines into real environments. The next decade will compress a century of progress in robotics, and we're looking for people who want to leave their fingerprints on that future.

We are based in San Francisco and work in-person.

The Role

You will own the physical build of our robots—from actuator selection and structural design to electrical integration and field-ready assembly. This is a full-stack mechatronics role: you will design, fabricate, wire, and troubleshoot hardware in a live deployment environment. No hand-offs. You will see your systems run in hotels.

This is not a test bench role. You will be solving real engineering problems under real constraints: variable floors, tight corridors, elevator transitions, and duty cycles that push hardware hard.

What You'll Do

• Design and fabricate mechanical systems: drivetrain, structure, actuation, linkages

• Own electrical architecture: power distribution, motor controllers, battery management, sensors, wiring harnesses

• Select and integrate components: motors, gearboxes, bearings, actuators, connectors

• Build prototypes in-house using our machine shop (mill, lathe, welding, 3D printing, laser cutting)

• Design for manufacturing, serviceability, and field reliability

• Debug hardware failures on deployed robots and drive fixes back into design

• Manage vendor relationships for custom parts and assemblies

What you bring

• Strong mechanical design fundamentals: carefully selected materials, GD&T, tolerance analysis, DFM

• Electrical system design: schematics, power systems, motor drives, sensor integration, harness design

• Hands-on fabrication skills—you've run a mill, bent sheet metal, soldered boards

• Experience with CAD (SolidWorks, Fusion, Onshape) and electrical CAD (Altium, KiCad)

• Possibly an alumni of FIRST Robotics, FSAE, BattleBots/combat robotics, or similar competitive build teams

• A portfolio of personal projects—show us what you've built on your own time

• Bias toward action. You prototype fast, test early, and fix what breaks.

Values

• Pace of learning trumps everything else.

• Refining our craft is something we pursue relentlessly.

• Low ego, high ownership.

• Commitment to the mission. We work in-person, and this isn't a 9-to-5. We're building something hard, and we need people who are all-in.