Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, Manufacturing Fixtures

About the role

Instrumental is a technology company that accelerates new product development and improves production yields for electronics manufacturers like NVIDIA, Cisco, and Meta. We leverage AI to process data from manufacturing floors, automate failure identification and resolution, and enhance yield, quality, and time-to-market.

Responsibilities

• Design production-ready fixtures, nests, test setups, and station hardware for electronics manufacturing environments.
• Own mechanical design from requirements gathering through CAD, prototype, fabrication, review, iteration, and deployment support.
• Develop fixture concepts that control product position repeatably while protecting sensitive electronics, cosmetic surfaces, buttons, flexes, connectors, and other high-risk features.
• Apply strong datum strategy, tolerance analysis, material selection, and design-for-manufacturing judgment to ensure fixtures work reliably in production.
• Partner with Solutions Architects, Hardware Engineering, Operations, customers, and manufacturing partners to understand product requirements and factory constraints.
• Communicate design tradeoffs, risks, assumptions, and schedule implications clearly and proactively.
• Support quick-turn fabrication using processes such as CNC machining, 3D printing, laser cutting, sheet metal, and other appropriate manufacturing methods.
• Review and improve existing designs, identifying risks related to manufacturability, assembly, robustness, usability, and long-term line performance.
• Help Instrumental deliver high-quality deployments for customers building some of the world’s most complex electronics products.

Requirements

• 8+ years of mechanical design experience, ideally in electronics manufacturing, fixture design, test hardware, automation, manufacturing engineering, or related roles.
• Deep experience designing fixtures, nests, test hardware, or production tooling for electronics products.
• CAD fluency in at least one professional 3D modeling tool; NX experience is a plus.
• Strong understanding of CNC machining and other quick-turn fabrication methods.
• Practical knowledge of GD&T, tolerance stackups, datum selection, material selection, and design for assembly.
• Experience designing for factory environments, including operator usability, robustness, ESD considerations, product protection, and throughput.

Qualifications

• Strong written and spoken English communication skills.
• Ability to travel occasionally to support customer deployments or manufacturing partners.
• Experience with optics, vision systems, AOI, camera stations, or inspection systems is a plus.

Skills

• Strong opinions about datums, repeatability, part protection, tolerancing, operator usability, quick-turn fabrication, and how to design fixtures that survive real line conditions.
• Fluency in CAD and comfort spending significant time designing, reviewing, and improving mechanical systems.
• Ability to anticipate fixture and production risks before they happen, including alignment drift, product damage, cosmetic issues, tolerance stackups, operator misuse, and throughput constraints.
• Experience moving quickly without sacrificing quality in fast-moving environments.

Benefits

At Instrumental, we offer competitive, location-based compensation. The following is a representative annual base salary range for the Bay Area: $150,000-$189,000. We also provide health, vision, dental, public transit/commuter plans, and parental leave. Additionally, we prioritize security and privacy, and all employees are expected to comply with our policies.