Mechanical Design Engineer

Matic · Menlo Park, California · $120,000 - $200,000 USD · Posted 2026-08-19

Company Overview ================

Each year, 2.5 trillion hours are spent on household chores. At Matic, we’re on a mission to recapture that lost time, and we’re doing it by revolutionizing home robotics.

Our first product, also called Matic, is a Wall-E-esque floor cleaning robot. We've built what amounts to "full self-driving in the home” with real-time 3D mapping, adaptive path-tracking, and a precise semantic understanding of the home. Our breakthroughs in spatial AI allow Matic to work reliably in real homes, using only RGB cameras and neural networks running on-device.

Privacy First -------------

What happens in the home, stays in the home. Our robots are private by design, with all data processing performed by the robot itself, not in the cloud.

Our Approach ------------

Before the iPhone, consumers adopted several distinct devices; cell phones, PDAs, and portable music players each served a particular need. We believe in a similar progression for home robotics, starting with single-purpose robots and building iteratively toward more complex capabilities over time.

Our Culture -----------

Matic is a tight-knit and collaborative team, singularly focused on building products our customers will cherish. We're ultra-hardworking people committed to solving tough problems that save precious time and energy.

About the role ==================

You'll own parts and sub-assemblies from concept through high volume production. Our robots are shipping to customers today, which means every part you design gets tooled, built at volume, and used daily in someone's home. You'll see your work in the field within months, not years.

This is a role for someone who wants to get their hands on real hardware immediately and build the judgment that comes from watching your own designs succeed and fail in production.

What you'll do

Design parts and sub-assemblies within a defined architecture, and carry them through to mass production

Build your own prototypes, break them, and iterate fast

Run component level testing for performance, durability, and part to part variability

Write and execute accelerated test plans that predict field behavior

Release production-ready 2D drawings that a supplier can quote and build without a follow-up call

Work directly with vendors and CMs on DFM feedback, tooling reviews, and first article inspection

Collaborate with EE, firmware, software, and industrial design to keep your parts balanced against the rest of the system

What we look for

Parts you personally designed that are in production today, and you can explain every feature and why it's there

Fluency in at least one high volume process (injection molding, die casting, stamping, or metal injection molding) at the level of gate placement, draft, knit lines, sink, and warp, not just textbook definitions

Tolerance stack-ups you've run on assemblies you owned, including how you chose the datum scheme and what you did when the stack didn't close

GD&T you actually apply on drawings, not GD&T you recognize on someone else's

Solidworks proficiency deep enough that CAD is never the bottleneck

Working experience with PDM/PLM, ECOs, and quality systems

FEA used to make a decision, with an understanding of where the model stops being trustworthy

A debugging instinct: given a part failing in the field, you can reason from the failure mode back to the design decision that caused it

Comfort in a fast-paced startup where the answer is often "go build it and find out"

A technical degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent. Most people ready for this role have around 2+ years of professional design experience, but if you can demonstrate the above with less, apply anyway.

Engineering Culture at Matic

We're a small team building a hard product. The work doesn't sort itself into a clean design lane.

A normal month here includes concept work and CAD. It also includes an 8pm call with a supplier in Asia, a tolerance study nobody's excited to run, a test fixture you build with your own hands, a life test that keeps failing for boring reasons, a return unit you tear down to find out why a clip is cracking, a drawing you update for the fourth time, and a part you chase through customs because the line is down without it.

None of that is beneath the job. All of it is the job, and most of it is where you'll get good.

The engineers who do best here own their parts from the first sketch to the last field failure, including every unglamorous step in between. Concept and prototyping are the fun half. Reliability setups, supplier calls, tolerance work, and documentation are the half that tells you whether the fun half was any good. We keep them together on purpose, because that's how you build the judgment to design something that actually survives a home.

The same goes past your own scope. If a fixture in the lab is broken, if data needs cleaning, if a different subsystem is blocking the build, people here move toward it. Scope is how we plan the work, not how we decide what's ours.

That's the shape of the team we're building. Being excited about a particular kind of engineering is great and we want that. But the people who've done the most for this company are the ones who wanted Matic to win first and picked up whatever that took.

We'd love to hear from you if...

You are genuinely motivated to help those around you

You are passionate about learning outside your normal comfort zones

You love diagnosing complex technical issues

You take pride in details nobody else would notice

Compensation

Base: $120,000 to $200,000 per annum.

Actual compensation will depend on skills, experience and qualifications. Base salary is one part of the total compensation package. The role is also eligible for equity through the company's discretionary equity program, along with a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage and access to a 401(k) plan.

About Matic

Matic is a technology startup that provides AI-powered indoor robots.

Mechanical Design Engineer

About Matic

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