Mechanical Design Engineer, Plastics
Mind Robotics
Listing collected from Mind Robotics's career site. NextChapter is independent of Mind Robotics.
Palo Alto, CA · Posted September 29, 2026
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Where Palo Alto, CA ranks
Where Palo Alto, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #3Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills28% · of 100
- #3Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast28% · of 54
- #3Best cities for AI-skill jobs37% · of 100
- #3Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast37% · of 71
- #4Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living$207k · of 28
- #4Best all-round cities for mid-career professionals83 / 100 · of 100
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 52 open mechanical design engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $98,500 to $145,000 and the median is $119,500.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Mechanical Design Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
AI use among mechanical engineers is little observed so far. Measured exposure for mechanical engineers: 8% (little observed).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
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About the job
ABOUT MIND:
Mind Robotics is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, starting with the factory floor. We believe the hardest problems in AI are solved when researchers and engineers are hands-on with the physical world every day - and we're looking for people who are passionate about robotics, value ownership, and are excited to tackle difficult problems.
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.