Senior Mechanical Engineer

We are making the world a more walkable place. Through intuitive personal mobility, we make walking faster, more efficient, and more accessible, empowering people to choose walking over sitting in traffic.

Our flagship product, Moonwalkers , are the world's fastest robotic shoes, augmenting natural walking with intelligent locomotion assistance. By giving people the ability to Moonwalk, we believe the path toward a more human-scale future can be reached on your own two feet.

We are covered in Time , Wired , New Atlas , CNET , Gizomodo , PCMag and many other tech press.

As a Mechanical Engineer at Shift, you will own the mechanical design of the next generation of Moonwalkers, from first sketch and prototype through tooling and mass production.

Our product is a wearable robot: motors, gearing, batteries, sensors and electronics packed into a shoe that a person stands, walks and climbs stairs on every day. The mechanical design has to be light, compact, comfortable and tough enough to survive real-world impact, water and wear.

You'll work in a small team alongside electrical, firmware and gait-control engineers, and you'll move fast between CAD, the shop and the test bench.

Responsibilities

- Product Design: Design mechanical systems for wearable robotic footwear, including housings, drivetrains, gearing, wheel and suspension assemblies, battery enclosures and binding/fit components.
- Mechatronic Packaging: Package motors, sensors, PCBAs, batteries and wiring into a compact, lightweight structure. Work with electrical and firmware engineers on thermal, sealing, connector and cable-routing decisions.
- Prototyping & Fabrication: Build fast prototypes with 3D printing, CNC and machining. Assemble, test and iterate hardware hands-on in our Austin lab.
- Analysis & Validation: Run tolerance stack-ups and FEA (structural, fatigue, vibration, drop/impact). Write and execute test plans for durability, water ingress and user-load cases, and turn results into design changes.
- Design for Manufacturing: Design injection-molded, die-cast and machined parts with DFM/DFA in mind. Release production drawings with GD&T (ASME Y14.5) and manage BOMs and engineering change orders.
- Supplier & Production Support: Work with vendors and contract manufacturers on tooling, first-article inspection, yield and quality issues through EVT, DVT and PVT.
- Safety & Reliability: A person is wearing the product. Design with safety margins, run failure analysis (DFMEA, root cause) and drive fixes from field returns and test failures.
- Documentation: Keep CAD, drawings, specs and test reports clean and current so the team can build on your work.

Requirements

- Education & Experience: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience), with 3+ years designing hardware products that reached real users or production.
- CAD: Strong production-grade CAD skills in SolidWorks, Siemens NX, Fusion 360, Creo or CATIA, including large assemblies and surfacing.
- Drawings & Tolerancing: Ability to create engineering drawings with GD&T (ASME Y14.5) and run tolerance analysis.
- Prototyping: Hands-on fabrication experience with 3D printing, CNC and machining, and comfort with shop tools and test fixtures.
- DFM/DFA: Solid understanding of design for manufacturing and assembly, materials selection and common processes such as injection molding and machining.
- Analysis: Working knowledge of mechanics of materials and engineering hand calculations to size parts and validate designs.
- Soft Skills: Ownership and self-drive. You get things done with minimal supervision, communicate clearly in writing, and are comfortable wearing multiple hats on a small team.
- Location: Able to work on-site in Austin, TX.

Preferred Qualifications

- Production Experience: Has taken injection-molded parts from design through tooling and into mass production, including vendor and supplier management.
- Simulation: FEA with ANSYS, Abaqus or SolidWorks Simulation (structural, fatigue, vibration, drop/impact), and mechanism or dynamics simulation in MATLAB/Simulink/Simscape.
- Lightweighting: Weight and topology optimization for compact, high-load structures.
- Robotics & Mechatronics: Experience integrating motors, gearboxes, sensors, batteries and microcontrollers into electromechanical systems; ROS familiarity is a plus.
- Wearables & Consumer Products: Experience with wearables, footwear, sporting goods, micromobility or other high-volume consumer hardware.
- Reliability Engineering: DFMEA, accelerated life testing, ingress protection (IP) and drop testing.
- Early-Stage Ownership: Owned a product's mechanical design end to end at a startup or small team.

Benefits

- Competitive salary and participation in our Employee Options program
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Medical, dental and vision insurance
- Flexible vacation, sick time and paid holidays
- A collaborative, fast-moving engineering team and a casual work environment
- The chance to shape the future of personal mobility