Founding Engineer (Hardware) Job at Recruiting From Scratch in Palo Alto

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

About Us

We are building the robotic delivery platform of tomorrow. You can think of us as an automated warehouse on wheels.

After taking jobs at UPS and FedEx, we realized that the last mile was broken and parcel delivery needed a new approach. Although delivery volumes have grown 5x in the past decade, delivery vans are stuck in 1950 and today’s process is highly inefficient and injury prone. Our first product is the X1 Robot which reimagines the guts of every delivery van you see on the road, and saves hours of labor per day for each vehicle.

Our vision is to fully automate the delivery chain with radically more efficient networks that reduce carbon emissions and congestion while enabling people and our planet to thrive.

About You

Are you a rockstar mechanical engineer? We’re serial founder alumni of Stanford / StartX / South Park Commons, and are well funded with awesome robotics founders and investors behind us. We’re looking for an awesome hardware engineer with the ambition and versatility to join with the first 5 employees at a robotics startup disrupting a massive legacy industry.

What you’ll do:

1. Bring delivery automation to life by developing key parts of our systems from foggy inklings to scaled manufacturing.
2. Develop firsthand knowledge of logistics challenges by doing actual deliveries and supporting customer tests of X1 and subsequent products.
3. Brainstorm new designs, mechanisms, and features to solve our customers’ problems, and collaborate tightly with our CTO and software team to identify cross functional dependencies and build the best possible product.
4. Use whiteboards, CAD, rapid prototyping, electronics, code, and elbow grease to design, test, and rapidly iterate.
5. Codify promising designs by developing functional requirements and specifications, test plans, detailed design and engineering analysis, DFM & DFA, BOMs, engineering drawings, assembly instructions, and maintenance guides.
6. Lead pilot builds of your designs and support our transition into production.
7. Help to source and manage new team members and contractors as we grow.

Personal characteristics: you are

1. A machete engineer: you cut through all kinds of difficult problems to get to your goal.
2. Biased toward action: when you see a problem, you fix it.
3. Driven and gritty: you can take punches and keep on going.
4. Calm in chaos: you can hold the tiller and sail through the hurricane.
5. A quick study: you learn fast and teach those around you.
6. A team and solo athlete: you perform well on your own and play well with others.
7. Self-aware and low ego: you can take and give feedback with grace.

You need to bring this:

1. BS or higher in Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, or equivalent experience.
2. Mastery of engineering fundamentals & first principles.
3. 4 or more years of hands-on experience developing complex mechanical products from whiteboard to production, ideally including manipulators such as robot arms or cartesian gantries, and motor control for servos (PID) and steppers.
4. Strong mechanical intuition and build skills crafting proof-of-concept prototypes in the shop: hand tools, 3D printing, laser cutting, milling, etc.
5. High proficiency in CAD (SolidWorks, Creo, or similar) including complex assemblies & configuration management, FEA, and properly-dimensioned drawings (GD&T desirable).
6. A working knowledge of failure avoidance methods such as FMEA, experience in tolerance, kinematic, and vibration analysis, DFM/DFA, and BOMs.
7. Experience with lab test instruments such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, DC loads, power supplies, spectrum analyzers, etc.
8. Strong understanding of electronics and programming fundamentals, and experience building embedded projects in C++ and Python using Arduino / ESP32 / STM32 / Raspberry Pi.
9. Good engineering judgment to meet deadlines and product performance goals: you can both hack and deploy fast, and structure robust systems that hold up to abuse and scale.
10. Excellent communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to inspire and motivate your teammates to achieve ambitious goals.
11. You thrive in startup environments, and can multi-task and manage conflicting deadlines.

We’d love if you also have this:

1. Built and deployed robot hardware to production.
2. Experience with robot EOAT & manipulators such as vacuum pickup or soft robotics.
3. Familiarity with software stack technologies (Docker, k8s, Linux, Git, etc.).

Compensation:

1. Salary: $160-200K.
2. Equity: 0.7- 1%.
3. Benefits: Healthcare plan, 401k, PTO, parental leave, and much more!