Senior Mechanical Engineer

Wanted:
Senior Mechanical Engineer

Anticipated start date:
As soon as possible

Salary Band: £50k - £60k (depending on experience)

Full Time, Sheffield, UK (Onsite)

Do you want to utilise your skills to help cure cancer and make a real-world impact?

AI Science and Autonomous Labs are buzzwords; we're building the actual robotics and software tooling to enable scientists to design, execute and analyse experiments without human intervention.

We seek a mechanical engineer who's been through the full product lifecycle more than once; someone who knows what good looks like because they've learned the hard way what bad looks like. You'll be a person our principal engineer can delegate projects to with confidence, knowing they'll come back done properly.

This isn't a role where you'll be handed a specification and left alone with CAD. You'll be deeply involved in decisions about how we build, how we manufacture, and how we ship products that work in the field. If you've spent your career building things that actually had to perform under real-world constraints, and you're ready to bring that experience to a team building something genuinely new, we'd like to talk.

• A bias for action to build products with customer value.
• Engineers who care about what they build, not just how.
• Clear thinking, pragmatism, and sound judgment over buzzwords.
• Friendly, organised, efficient, and enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude.
• People who take responsibility and follow problems through.
• Low-ego individuals who love asking questions & go above and beyond to help the team succeed.

You’ll report to our principal engineer and work across our mechanical engineering function. Day-to-day, you’ll split your time between hands-on design work, managing engineering projects through to delivery, and mentoring team members.

A big part of this role is raising the bar. We need someone who brings rigour, proper documentation, clean CAD practices, structured design reviews, and an instinct for catching problems before they become expensive. You’ll help us build the engineering discipline that lets a small team deliver products at a level our customers expect.

Key Responsibilities:

• Leading mechanical design projects from concept through detailed design, prototyping, and release to manufacture.
• Owning design-for-manufacture and design-for-assembly decisions, making sure what we design can actually be built reliably and cost-effectively.
• Managing engineering project timelines, deliverables, and priorities in coordination with the principal engineer.
• Working with suppliers and manufacturing partners to resolve production issues and drive continuous improvement.
• Contributing to design reviews, risk assessments, and technical documentation.

• A strong track record of delivering manufactured physical products and electromechanical systems that work in the real world.
• Deep proficiency in CAD (we use Onshape; proficiency in Solid Works or similar is fine).
• Proven experience with design for manufacture and assembly: you understand tolerance stacks, materials, joining methods, and what makes something manufacturable.
• Experience managing or leading engineering projects: scoping work, tracking progress, and delivering on time.
• Strong communication skills: you can explain your design decisions clearly and push back constructively when something isn't right.
• A methodical approach to documentation, version control, and engineering rigour.
• Experience with, and willingness to do, rapid prototyping on the shop floor using hand tools, additive manufacturing, CNC, etc.

• Experience designing precision electromechanical systems, instrumentation, or laboratory equipment.
• Familiarity with GMP, ISO, and regulated manufacturing…