Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

The Mission

GRAM is a self replication company creating populations of insectoids for the physical economy.

Our first research frontier is self-preservation: the base case of physical self-replication. Our machines will survive, coordinate, and recover without humans. We believe scalable machine labor requires more than single-agent task generality or machines shaped in our image.

About the role

You will design the structures and mechanisms that carry insectoid loads and protect critical systems. You will move from first-principles sizing through detailed CAD, drawings, prototype hardware, instrumented test, and released revisions across lightweight structures, joints, housings, covers, routing, interfaces, and mechanisms.

You will own the structural, alignment, environmental, thermal-packaging, routing, and service integration of machine subsystems, including the physical interfaces for actuator modules. The work demands explicit load cases and margins proved on physical hardware.

What you will do

• Turn robot motion, contact, transport, service, and fault cases into free-body diagrams, load cases, structural requirements, margins, and verification plans.
• Select and mechanically integrate actuators; design load-bearing body structures, joints and mechanisms, sensor and compute mounts, environmental enclosures, protective elements, and cable or hose routing.
• Produce release-quality 3D CAD, assemblies, drawings, GD&T, tolerance stacks, material and process specifications, and bills of materials.
• Use hand calculations and FEA to evaluate stress, stiffness, buckling, fatigue, vibration, impact, fastener behavior, and thermal distortion.
• Build and instrument prototypes; correlate strain, displacement, load, modal, impact, and cycle-life measurements with predictions.
• Investigate cracks, yielding, loosening, wear, fretting, misalignment, ingress, and assembly discrepancies, then carry corrections through verified retest.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Released complex mechanical parts and assemblies in a major CAD system such as NX, CATIA, Creo, or SolidWorks, including drawings and ASME Y14.5 GD&T.
• Generated and released calculations for the governing structural failure modes and tolerance stack of hardware subsequently fabricated and tested.
• Took a complex mechanical assembly from CAD and drawings through fabrication, inspection, assembly, and instrumented test, resolving an as-built tolerance or process failure.
• Produced measured structural or mechanism test data and used it to resolve a fracture, deformation, fatigue, vibration, wear, or tolerance-driven failure through verified redesign.

Preferred experience

• Lightweight robotic, aerospace, automotive, or industrial mechanisms operating under dynamic and repeated loads.
• Nonlinear or dynamic FEA, modal testing, fracture mechanics, tribology, sealing, or environmental protection.
• Design for assembly, supplier technical review, inspection planning, or prototype-to-production transfer.

The annual base salary range for this Palo Alto position is $150,000–$185,000. Health coverage, benefits, and generous equity come with the role. This role is on-site in Palo Alto. A relocation bonus is available. We hire to start as soon as possible. We review what you’ve shipped; if it’s the caliber we seek, interviews take about a week, start to finish. We treat your work and conversations with discretion.