Mechanical Design Engineer, Plastics
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 30, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 29, 2026. Mind Robotics scores A on the Alion truth index.
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.