Founding Mechanical Engineer​/Designer

About Bracket Bot

Bracket Bot is building the affordable robot platform developers have been waiting for.

Useful robots are still too expensive, too closed, too fragile, and too hard to program. We think that changes when great robot hardware becomes cheap enough for developers, labs, startups, and customers to build on top of it the way they build on computers.

We are a small San Francisco team building low-cost, general-purpose robots that developers can program and deploy in days. The work is physical and immediate: robots in the office, 7

DOF arms, servos, bushings, springs, printed parts, cable routing, thermal constraints, supplier decisions, BOM pressure, assembly bottlenecks, and a product that has to become dramatically easier to build without becoming less capable.

Our goal is to build the platform company that helps robotics have its app-store moment. We are backed by Fifty Years, Box Group, Betaworks, Pace Capital, Logan Kilpatrick, Mohith Mothukuri, Guillermo Rauch, and other great investors and builders.

Design the robot so it can be built, repaired, improved, and shipped fast.

This is not a CAD-only role and not a narrow mechanical analysis role. You will own large parts of the robot's mechanical system from vague requirement to CAD, prototype, assembled robot, test result, supplier feedback, and the next revision.

At Bracket Bot, mechanical design directly determines whether developers can actually build useful robotics applications. The robot has to be approachable, low-cost, robust enough for real use, safe around people, serviceable by a small team, and simple enough to assemble in batches without heroics.

You will work across robot structure, arms, joints, actuation, sensor and compute packaging, cable routing, thermal design, covers, fixtures, tolerances, part sourcing, assembly flow, and the messy handoff from prototype to production.

The best person for this role wants the full loop: sketch, CAD, print or machine, assemble, debug, break, measure, simplify, source, document, and ship.

• Reports to: Founder / CEO and founding engineering team

• Location: San Francisco, in person

• Core job: Own mechanical design and build path for a low-cost developer robot

• Scope: CAD, mechanisms, actuation, structure, thermal and cable routing, assembly, fixtures, BOM cost, suppliers, testing, and production feedback

• Best fit: A high-ownership builder with excellent mechanical judgment who can make robots better at the bench and cheaper in production

• Mechanical architecture: Design the structures, mechanisms, joints, covers, mounts, service panels, and assemblies that make the robot capable, approachable, and manufacturable.

• Actuation and mechanisms: Work on motors, servos, transmissions, bushings, bearings, horns, sleeves, springs, stiffness, backlash, load paths, and the practical details that make motion reliable.

• Packaging and integration: Package cameras, cables, PCBs, fans, heatsinks, connectors, power, compute, sensors, and fasteners so the robot can be assembled, serviced, and iterated quickly.

• Prototype-to-production loop: Move from CAD to printed, machined, or sourced parts; assemble robots yourself; debug failures; update drawings, BOMs, and release notes; then do it again.

• DFM, DFA, and cost: Simplify parts, reduce assembly time, choose processes and materials, create fixtures and jigs, talk to suppliers, and make cost and reliability visible in every design decision.

• Test and reliability: Build practical tests for wear, cable failures, heat, impacts, backlash, cycle life, serviceability, and the ways real robots fail outside a clean CAD model.

• Cross-functional hardware work: Collaborate tightly with electrical, robotics software, autonomy, and operations so algorithms, boards, harnesses, calibration, and physical design improve together.

• Mechanical culture: Help set the standard for CAD hygiene, drawings, part numbering, prototype logs, design reviews, and the lightweight systems a tiny hardware team needs to move fast without losing the thread.

In your first 90 days, you should expect to:

• Build and tear down the current robot until you understand the real assembly flow, failure modes, cost drivers, and service pain points.

• Own two or three immediate mechanical improvements from CAD to tested robot. Examples might include cable routing, wrist camera packaging, cooling, bushing and sleeve tolerances, servo mounting, arm stiffness, covers, fixtures, or assembly simplification.

• Create a mechanical roadmap for the next robot revision: what gets cheaper, stronger, easier to assemble, easier to repair, and less likely to fail.

• Tighten the CAD, BOM, drawing, and release process enough that parts, suppliers, and robot builds stay in sync.

• Stand up simple tests for the failure modes that matter most: thermal, cable strain, repeated motion, impacts, joint wear, and assembly variation.

• Work with EE on connector, PCB, power, thermal, and packaging constraints, and with software…