Senior Mechanical Engineer

ABOUT TUESDAY

Tuesday Lab builds delightful robots. We are driven by a desire to make everyday life easier and more fun with cutting-edge robotics. If you love building for the sake of building, taking something all the way to a beautiful finished product, and take inspiration from sci-fi rather than real life, you should come work at the Lab.

We are engineers, researchers, and builders who love living among our creations. Our mission is to make the magical world of animated objects accessible to everyone.

SENIOR MECHANICAL ENGINEER, CONSUMER ROBOTICS

We are hiring a Senior Mechanical Engineer to own the mechanical execution of our consumer-facing robot hardware. This is a hands-on role for someone who has brought real consumer products to market, loves both the nitty gritty work of early prototyping and the detailed work of design for manufacturing, and can move quickly from ambiguous goals to physical prototypes.

In the near term, you will design, CAD, prototype, and refine the external shells and mechanical systems that turn a robotics platform into a consumer product. You will collaborate closely with industrial design, mechatronics engineering, software, suppliers, and product. Over time, you will help shape our hardware strategy, supplier relationships, manufacturing approach, and product development process.

This is a player-coach role. For the first 6 months, we expect you to be deeply hands-on: CADing parts and building demo-ready prototypes. Over the following 6–12 months, we expect this person to continue IC work and grow into the senior hardware leader under the CEO.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional hardware work across industrial design, mechatronics, software, and product, from roadmap creation through prototype build, test, and iteration.
• Define acceptance criteria, design reviews, prototype test plans, and safety-related mechanical requirements.
• Translate industrial design concepts into manufacturable CAD.
• Work through fit, finish, CMF, tolerances, fastening, DFM, and safety tradeoffs.
• Design around moving parts, user interaction, pinch points, impact risk, and repeated mechanical use.
• Source parts and vendors across processes such as CNC, 3D printing, urethane casting, and injection molding.
• Own cosmetic execution for high-priority stakeholder demos, including material, color, finish, and overall build quality.
• Maintain and develop relationships with robotics suppliers, hardware vendors, and prototype manufacturing partners.
• Over time, contribute to manufacturing strategy.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of mechanical engineering experience.
• Experience working on at least 2 consumer products as they went to market.
• Strong SolidWorks CAD skills; you have CADed professionally in the last 2 years.
• Experience leading cross-functional hardware work across design, engineering, manufacturing, suppliers, or vendors.
• Experience designing plastic parts and taking them through prototyping to production. Strong practical DFM judgment.
• Experience with consumer products that include moving parts, mechanisms, motors, actuators, repetitive motion, or meaningful mechanical/user interaction.
• Experience thinking through consumer safety: pinch points, sharp edges, stability, impact risk, overheating, durability, misuse cases, reliability, and safe interaction with people.
• Comfort working directly with industrial designers and translating design intent into real, buildable hardware.
• High ownership: we should be able to give you an ambiguous goal like “build the shell for the gripper,” watch you ask the right few questions, and trust you to come back with a thoughtful, working result.
• Strong communication: you raise risks early, make tradeoffs explicit, and keep the team moving.
• Comfort with ambiguity, changing requirements, and making tradeoffs in order to move fast.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with manufacturing in China and Mexico.
• Experience working with legged robotics platforms.
• Experience with cosmetic consumer hardware, premium product surfaces, or high-touch CMF execution.
• Experience with supplier selection, contract manufacturers, tooling, reliability, quality, or production ramp.
• Experience with lower-volume consumer hardware, ideally products manufactured at roughly 10,000–50,000 units/year rather than only ultra-high-volume commodity products.
• Familiarity with consumer product safety standards, certification processes, reliability testing, or compliance workflows.

You may not be a fit if

• You are primarily a people manager and no longer want to CAD or build.
• You are a pure IC who does not want to lead cross-functional work.
• Your background is mostly aerospace, medical devices, or research hardware without consumer product exposure.
• You have only worked on static enclosures or commodity high-volume products with limited mechanical interaction.
• You are uncomfortable with rapid iteration, ambiguity, or hands-on prototyping.

If you don’t have these qualifications, but you really want to do this job, you should apply for it anyway. This is a startup: passion and work ethic count for a lot.

WHAT TUESDAY OFFERS

• A rare opportunity to shape the physical form of a new consumer robot from the beginning.
• Work alongside people with deep expertise who love playful applications of advanced engineering problems and are excited about designing the future.
• Freedom to rapidly iterate, steer the technical direction of the company, and use your full set of creative skills to solve difficult problems trading off function, design and product.
• Work in our sunny, robot-filled office in Union Square in NYC, with flexibility to wfh 1 day per week for deep focus. Health, vision and dental insurance, FSA, 401(k), commuter benefits, unlimited sick days.