Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

About Lyte

Lyte builds perception systems for Physical AI operating in complex environments. The company combines custom silicon, integrated sensors, and software into a unified platform for robotics, mobility, and next-generation automation. Lyte is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with a global presence. For more information, visit www.lyte.ai

If you’re excited about building impactful technology in a dynamic, hands-on environment, we’d love to hear from you!

About the role

• Lyte is seeking a Senior Mechanical Engineer to own the structural and thermal design of our sensing hardware, from architecture through volume production. The Product Design team is responsible for developing robust modules that integrate Lyte’s sensing technology to deliver class-leading perception capabilities, operate across a wide range of environments, and are manufacturable at scale. Our team is small and works end to end: architecture and analysis, interacting with suppliers and contract manufacturers, developing test setups, and resolving challenges on the path to production. We collaborate closely with disciplines across the company, in engineering R&D and operations.

What you'll do

• Own mechanical structural and thermal analysis and design for new product development, from first-principles estimates through finite element modeling and validation testing.
• Translate product, system, and optics needs into mechanical requirements; identify and resolve ambiguities.
• Develop and maintain tolerance analyses and error budgets in the mechanical domain, and correlate them to measured hardware.
• Design for long-term stability — alignment and performance that hold over temperature, shock, vibration, and the life of the product across a range of customer environments.
• Develop and execute mechanical, thermal, and environmental test plans at component and product level; analyze data and lead root-cause investigations for testing and field issues.
• Design for volume manufacturing and work directly with manufacturing partners and suppliers through NPI, qualification, and ramp.
• Work on cross-functional teams with systems, optics, electrical, and firmware engineering throughout the product life cycle, and support internal test and fixturing needs as they arise.

Required Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering or a related field, with 4+ years of mechanical design experience in precision electromechanical or optical products, or a bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of relevant experience.
• Expertise with mechanical CAD and FEA (structural, thermal, modal).
• Strong analytical capacity — breaking down abstract goals into analytical models at the appropriate level, from back-of-envelope to spreadsheet to FEA, and judgment about which level a problem deserves.
• Demonstrated ownership of tolerance analyses and error budgets, including validating them against real hardware.
• Manufacturing process knowledge and a mindset of design for manufacturability.
• Strong communication and presentation skills; able to present analysis and design rationale concisely to cross-functional partners, suppliers, and customers.
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally as needed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Optical systems and optomechanical design experience (lens assemblies, system-level alignment, metrology), including design for performance across product lifetime.
• Experience developing space-constrained designs operating in challenging real-world environments.
• Experience with and aptitude for working closely with manufacturing/operations teams and CM/JDM partners for NPI and throughout the product life cycle.
• Mechanical, thermal, and environmental testing experience at component and product level.
• Design for consumer-scale volume manufacturing — injection molding, die casting, stamping.
• Robotics, mobile platforms, or autonomous systems experience.
• Thermal, structural, and multiphysics simulation beyond general-purpose FEA (CFD, magnetics, etc.)
• Expertise in statistical data analysis (JMP, Minitab, Python, R, etc.).

Benefits (subject to location and local regulations)

• Competitive salary and equity 
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage 
• 401(k) retirement plan 
• Flexible vacation and time-off policy 
• Collaborative, fast-paced, and inclusive work environment 
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies with a highly cross-functional team