Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation

A Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation employer partner is seeking a full-time Mechanical Engineer to join their team.

We’re looking for a mechanical engineer who thrives with unusually high degrees of ownership over their projects. The ideal person can be dropped into a vague situation, figure out what the actual problem is, design a solution, build it, test it, and iterate on it with minimal guidance.

There won’t always be a detailed spec, an established process, or someone telling you exactly what to do next. You’ll have a lot of freedom, but that freedom comes with real responsibility. Some weeks you’ll be refining the mechanical architecture of a robotic hand. Other weeks you may be machining parts, building an exoglove, fixing a test cell, mounting a perception system, helping to debug electronics, or inventing a mechanism that didn’t exist yesterday. A large part of the job is simply making our robots work better, faster.

What you’ll work on: Design, prototype, test, and refine subsystems on our new generations of dexterous robotic hands. Diagnose failures in test cells and deployed systems, understand the underlying problem, and design the fix. Build the hardware infrastructure needed to deploy many robotic systems both internally and externally and collect large amounts of real-world manipulation data. Rapidly fabricate parts and fixtures using 3D printing, desktop CNC machining, hand tools, and whatever other process gets the job done well and quickly. Design exogloves, test rigs, perception mounts, tooling, fixtures, and other hardware around the robotic system. Work closely with software and controls development to make the complete machine perform better, not just the mechanical parts in isolation. Take projects from a rough idea through CAD, fabrication, assembly, testing, iteration, and deployment. Help evolve designs from scrappy prototypes toward robust, manufacturable products.

You should be comfortable with: Mechanical design, CAD, and 3D modeling. Building things yourself in scrappy and quick ways. Working quickly with imperfect information. Owning problems that may not fall neatly inside a classic ME job description and require some coding / electronics to finish. A very early-stage environment where priorities can change quickly. Switching between careful engineering and extremely scrappy prototyping depending on the situation. Experience designing products for manufacturing or higher-volume production is a major plus. A mechanical engineering degree and several years of experience are useful signals, but neither is a hard requirement. Exceptional people take unusual paths.

More than any specific credential, we’re looking for people who are just excited to solve this challenge and would rather quickly build and test a variety of ideas than spend weeks debating the perfect one.