Mechanical Engineer, Election Hardware

Mechanical Engineer, Election Hardware

Level: Mid-career

Team: Hardware Engineering

Location: Bellingham, WA preferred, with a strong preference for onsite work

Remote: Open to remote candidates for the right fit, but a remote role would require frequent travel to Bellingham, especially at the start of builds, during production ramps, and any time significant production issues arise. We estimate someone in this role working remotely would need to travel approximately 30% of the year.

Travel (for both Bellingham and remote candidates):
Occasional travel to vendors and other sites as needed.

Compensation: $132,000 - $200,000 is the full range, accounting for all geographic areas and leveling. We adjust salaries depending on location. The full range for this role in Whatcom County, WA is $157,750 - $190,000.

Elections are the foundation of democracy, and democracy depends on elections that are broadly trusted. Voting Works is a non-partisan, non-profit that is building technology that powers elections everyone can trust.

We use open-source software, modern product engineering, and advanced security to build:

• Auditing technology that increases trust in legacy voting systems
• Modern voting systems that are much more broadly trusted

Our auditing system is used by 9 states, including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Texas, Nevada, and Washington. Our voting system is deployed in 2 states, Mississippi and New Hampshire. Most notably, we are the first new voting system in New Hampshire in more than 30 years.

We are building voting technology. We believe in voting machines that can be trusted by the public, by election officials, and by security experts. We also believe in supporting robust and transparent post-election audits, to provide confidence in election results. If you’re like us, you’ve been thinking about the myriad problems and rough edges of our democracy for a while. We’ve decided that talking about it isn’t enough – we must do something.

If you feel the same way, we hope you’ll consider joining our team.

The Voting Works hardware team is a small group of engineers and specialists responsible for the full lifecycle of our voting system hardware — from mechanical design and BOM management to manufacturing coordination, procurement, and regulatory certification. We work across disciplines: mechanical design in Solid Works, electrical and EMC/ESD testing, supply chain, and hands‑on assembly and build validation. No one owns a narrow slice;

everyone engages with the broader system.

We work closely with contract manufacturers, external test labs, and internal software and operations teams, so clear communication and strong documentation are as important as technical skill. Our products are deployed in real elections, which means the bar for rigor is high and the consequences of errors are real — we take that seriously without losing the pragmatism needed to ship.

The team is flat in the way that matters: good ideas and hard questions are welcome from everyone, regardless of title. We’ve grown through a period of transition and taken on more shared ownership as a result. We’re looking for people who are self‑directed, comfortable with ambiguity, and invested in doing careful work that holds up in the field.

Our hardware team is small, and it is a bottleneck to shipping product. We have more design work, more builds, more vendor coordination, and more production support than the current team can absorb. We need to grow.

We currently need a mechanical engineer who can take work from rough problem statement to a released drawing package, and then stay with it through quote, build, fallout, and revision.

This role is especially important during production. Outside of active build phases, the engineer's primary focus is on optimizing our intake and assembly processes. This includes designing intake fixtures and updating any assemblies that are proving difficult.

When builds are active, this engineer will serve as the main owner for all mechanical issues and manufacturing problems that arise. They will work directly with the production team to…