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Mechanical Design Engineer, Plastics
Mindrobotics · Palo Alto
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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.