The Role
Design production-ready fixtures, nests, test setups, and station hardware for electronics manufacturing. Own designs from requirements through CAD, prototyping, fabrication, iteration, and deployment. Apply datum strategy, tolerance analysis, material selection, and DFM judgment. Partner with solutions architects, customers, and manufacturing partners to ensure robustness, usability, and reliable production performance.
Summary Generated by Built In
Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.
We're looking for a Mechanical Design Engineer to design the fixtures, optics, and hardware that make our technology work on production lines around the world.
This isn't a role where you'll spend years refining a single product.
You'll solve a wide variety of manufacturing challenges across consumer electronics, wearables, networking equipment, AI infrastructure, and other complex hardware. Every customer brings a different product, manufacturing process, and set of constraints, which means you'll constantly be designing new solutions, rapidly iterating, interacting with our customer’s brilliant engineers, and moving on to the next challenge.
If you enjoy solving difficult mechanical problems, building practical solutions quickly, and seeing your designs deployed in real factories, you'll thrive here.
What You'll Do
- Design production-ready stations, including fixtures, optics, and mounting hardware for a wide range of electronics products.
- Own projects from customer requirements through concept development, CAD, prototyping, fabrication, validation, and deployment.
- Rapidly evaluate multiple design approaches and iterate quickly as product requirements evolve.
- Balance precision, manufacturability, robustness, operator usability, cost, and speed without overengineering.
- Work directly with customers, manufacturing engineers, technicians, suppliers, and internal teams to solve complex manufacturing problems.
- Partner with external fabrication vendors to deliver quick-turn prototypes and production hardware using CNC machining, sheet metal, 3D printing, laser cutting, and other fabrication methods.
- Identify manufacturing risks early and proactively drive solutions before they become production issues.
- Develop and continuously improve scalable design processes, documentation, and workflows that increase the speed, consistency, and quality of hardware deployments as the team expands.
We're Looking For Someone Who...
- Has extensive experience, ideally 3+ years, designing fixtures, production tooling, test hardware, or manufacturing equipment for electronics manufacturing.
- Has designed hardware that has been built, deployed, and used successfully in production environments.
- Moves quickly without sacrificing engineering judgment.
- Enjoys solving many different mechanical problems rather than long cycles of design optimization.
- Is comfortable working with ambiguity and incomplete information and can make thoughtful engineering decisions without waiting for perfect requirements.
- Has hands-on experience working in factory environments and designing for the practical realities of production, including repeatability, operator usability, product protection, and throughput.
- Communicates clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and can explain engineering tradeoffs effectively.
- Thrives with a high degree of autonomy, taking ownership of project timelines and proactively driving work from concept through deployment.
Preferred Experience
- Mechanical design experience supporting electronics manufacturing, NPI, manufacturing engineering, factory automation, or production tooling.
- Deep knowledge of fixture design, GD&T, tolerance stack-ups, datum strategy, material selection, and design for manufacturing.
- Strong CAD skills (NX preferred).
- Experience with CNC machining and rapid fabrication processes.
- Familiarity with consumer electronics, wearables, networking equipment, server hardware, AI infrastructure, or other high-volume electronics products.
- Experience working directly with contract manufacturers or production lines.
- Exposure to vision systems, optics, inspection equipment, or automated test systems is a plus.
- Ability to travel occasionally to customer sites.
Instrumental offers competitive, location-based compensation. The following is a representative annual base salary range for the Bay Area: $130,000-$155,000.
Job leveling and salary opportunity are evaluated through our interview process—we review each applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Instrumental’s benefits include: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Parental Leave.
At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.
Skills Required
- 3+ years of mechanical design experience designing fixtures, nests, test setups, or manufacturing aids for electronics production environments.
- Designed hardware that was built, deployed, and used in manufacturing environments (not just modeled in CAD).
- Understanding of datum strategy, tolerancing, repeatability, operator usability, part protection, ESD, manufacturability, and quick-turn fabrication.
- Experience with electronics products such as consumer devices, wearables, PCBs, server hardware, industrial electronics, or other high-volume hardware.
- Fluency in CAD and comfortable spending significant time designing and reviewing mechanical systems with a professional 3D modeling tool.
- NX experience
- Strong understanding of CNC machining and other quick-turn fabrication methods (3D printing, laser cutting, sheet metal, etc.).
- Practical knowledge of GD&T, tolerance stackups, datum selection, material selection, and design for assembly.
- Experience designing for factory environments, including operator usability, robustness, ESD considerations, product protection, and throughput.
- Strong written and spoken English communication skills.
- Ability to travel occasionally to support customer deployments or manufacturing partners.
- Experience with optics, vision systems, AOI, camera stations, or inspection systems.
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The Company
What We Do
Accelerate product maturity, de-risk ramp, and improve yields. Instrumental helps you find and fix issues you didn't even know were there.
