Job description for Mechanical Design Engineer at Autonomous Inc
Who we are
Autonomous is a US company. We design and manufacture our own hardware and sell it worldwide, from offices in New York, San Francisco, Shenzhen and Saigon. We publish our CAD, electronics and firmware as open source.
WHAT WE BUILD
We started with ergonomic desks and chairs. Today we are an AI hardware workshop, a few of the things our team has made:
- Lamp - an articulated desk robot with five moving joints. It watches what you are working on, remembers it, and speaks up on its own. Face recognition runs on the device and never leaves it.
- Harness - a matte black disc with a round always-on screen, no buttons and no menus. Double-tap, speak, and it puts your coding agents to work. It shows what is running, what is done, and what it cost.
- POD - a prefabricated backyard office that ships flatpack, needs no concrete and no permit, and goes up in one to two days.
- Soul -a paper animal you fold by hand in twenty minutes. Tap your phone to the NFC chip in its head and it wakes up with a personality, and a memory that never resets.
- Key - a passive NFC card that locks the apps you doom-scroll. No battery, no charging, no subscription. To unlock, you have to physically touch the card.
- Intern - a small always-on server that runs your AI agents at home, on your own hardware, with your keys and context stored locally.
- Desk Pro - a standing desk that reads the room: CO₂, fine dust, VOC and noise sensors built in.
- Autonomous Computer — multi-GPU machines that let a company run large models on its own premises.
Most of them run on Autonomous OS, our open-source operating system for physical AI agents — so a skill written for one device runs on the next one. This is what makes the hardware team interesting: the products share a platform, but no two of them are the same engineering problem.
WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
We need a Mechanical Design Engineer to design the next generation of Autonomous hardware.
SCOPE OF WORK
- Design. Take a product from concept and sketch through to a complete CAD model and a drawing set the factory can build from.
- Prove it. Calculate what matters — loads, stiffness, torque, heat, tolerances — before it gets made, not after.
- Prototype. Machine and print your own parts, build it, break it, and change the design.
- Make it manufacturable. Fewer parts, simpler assembly, lower cost, and a build sequence someone else can follow. Work with our factories and suppliers from the first sketch, not at the end.
- Test it. Drop, vibration, weather, life cycle — you design the tests and you decide what passes.
REQUIREMENTS
- Experience designing physical products, with at least one that was actually made and sold.
- Good physics and maths — you can calculate loads, stiffness, torque and heat, not just draw a shape and hope it holds.
- Strong 3D CAD (SolidWorks, Creo, Fusion 360, Inventor, NX or similar) and tolerance stack-ups.
- Real depth in at least one manufacturing process — injection molding and tooling, or sheet metal, weldments and steel fabrication. CNC programming, so you can machine your own parts and get to a prototype in days rather than weeks.
- Designing for cost and assembly time, not only for function (DFM / DFA).
- You use AI in your daily work, from checking calculations and comparing design options to writing scripts that speed up CAD and CNC tasks. We build AI hardware, and we expect you to work that way.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Competitive salary package with full medical and dental coverage.
- Flexible working time and a fast-moving team environment.
- Free lunch, snacks, and coffee at the office.
- Unlimited sick leave, official holidays, and at least 12 paid days off annually.
- MacBook, laptop, monitor, standing desk, and the tools you need to do your best work.
- Access to online courses and AI tools that help you work better.
