Mechanical Design Engineer, Plastics

Responsibilities

• Own the mechanical design of A-surface plastic components for the robot — covers, skins, shrouds, bezels, and cosmetic enclosures — from industrial design intent through production tooling.
• Develop Class-A surfaces and translate ID surfacing into manufacturable parts, holding gap-and-flush, parting line, draft, and aesthetic intent across the full assembly.
• Select polymers and processes across the cosmetic stack: ABS, PC, PC/ABS, PA and glass-filled grades, TPU/TPE, and specialty resins — balancing appearance, impact and creep behavior, chemical and UV resistance, flammability, and cost.
• Define and own GD&T, tolerance stack-ups, and datum schemes across multi-part plastic assemblies and their interfaces to structures, actuators, and electronics.
• Drive DFM and DFA for injection molding, insert molding, overmolding, and secondary operations — gate and ejector strategy, wall thickness, ribbing and boss design, warp and sink mitigation, and shutoff design.
• Own cosmetic specification: textures, gloss levels, color matching, painting, plating, laser etching, and in-mold decoration, plus the defect standards and limit samples that go with them.
• Work directly with tool shops, molders, and CMs through tool kickoff, T0/T1 sampling, tuning, and PPAP — reviewing mold flow, tool design, and first-shot parts, and driving corrective action.
• Build and test prototypes using 3D printing, urethane casting, CNC, and soft tooling, then validate with drop, structural, and environmental testing.

Qualifications

• Exceptional mechanical intuition. You understand how polymers flow, shrink, warp, and fail — and you can predict it before the tool is cut.
• 5+ years designing injection-molded plastic parts for high-volume consumer, automotive, or robotics products, with parts you took from CAD through production tooling.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of polymer materials science: resin families, fillers and additives, anisotropy, moisture sensitivity, and how process conditions change part behavior.
• Fluent in GD&T (ASME Y14.5 or ISO GPS) and tolerance analysis, including worst-case and statistical stack-ups on compliant plastic parts.
• Proven experience owning cosmetic A-surface parts and defending appearance standards with vendors.
• Strong surfacing skills in SolidWorks, CATIA, NX, Creo, or similar; comfort reading mold flow results and tool drawings.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, moves fast, and curious about how the whole system works.