Mechanical Robotics Engineer

About the Role

Intuition is a Silicon Valley robotics startup backed by some of the most prestigious investors in tech, connected to Founders Fund, MiniMax, Raspberry Pi, and others. Our team has backgrounds from Stanford University, UC Berkeley BAIR, Fudan AI, CMU Robotics Institute, and Google, and we work with industrial partners including KUKA, UR, Midea, Mercedes Benz, P&G, IKEA, and SF Express Logistics.

You'll join the Rapid Prototyping team at our Shenzhen deployment center: robots from many vendors arrive with an application, we build the station platform around them, and the solution ships. Every station shares one platform: a height-adjustable torso, two arms at ALOHA spacing, a top-view neck camera, fish-eye wrist cameras, a mid-height torso camera, and one Jetson Orin. V0 is a stationary single-arm station; V1 adds the second arm, one cable to the wall, and wheels that lock solid; V2 goes mobile with wheeled navigation, battery, and 5G.

Rapid Prototyping is our pre-humanoid team. We're building the next generation of robots, headed for deployment at Mercedes-Benz and into large-scale consumer robotics. We integrate models from our earlier collaborations with Physical Intelligence together with our own model architectures, so deployments truly scale. And we build at the hardware speed of Shenzhen.

If you've designed a RoboMaster robot's chassis or gimbal, built robots for Robocon or a university team, or worked at a robotics company in engineering or support, this role is for you, as long as you're ready to go all in. You'll own the mechanical details of the robot platforms we deploy, from concept to reliable manufacturing. Two station variants set the bar. The heavy variant carries industrial arms from UR, KUKA, ABB, or ROKAE. The light variant carries AgileX Piper, ARX X5, or YAM arms for service and hospitality work such as towel folding, and it has to blend in.

On this team you start with off-the-shelf parts, get a first version standing, and redesign the moment it teaches you something. Next to the Rapid Prototyping Engineer, the team's generalist builder, you are the mechanical specialist. Your data-collection work starts with our wearable first-person camera, a lightweight device that skilled workers put on at work. It records how skilled work is done; it is not there to evaluate anyone, and privacy pauses are built into the SOP. The role is open to students, new grads, and experienced engineers, starting as soon as you're ready.

What You'll Do

• Design the station platform for everyday workplaces, from stationary V0 to mobile V2: rigid base, locking wheels, torso, camera neck, wrist mounts.
• Make the heavy variant hold two 25 kg-plus arms with zero movement while both arms work.
• Do the mechanical design for robotic arms, starting with our next teleoperation leader arm: an encoder-based GELLO.
• Design the mechanics of our data-collection hardware, starting with the wearable first-person camera.
• Build manufacturability into every part from the first version: these robots are meant to be manufactured at scale.
• Send designs to manufacturing and close a one-day iteration cycle.
• Run rapid assembly and testing on every revision, and source the components and tools that keep prototyping fast.
• Share each one-day iteration cycle with the PCB engineer: you own structure and mechanisms, they own power, boards, and wiring.

What We're Looking For

• No hard prerequisites to apply: we hire on what you have built, not on titles.
• Hands-on robotics experience: a RoboMaster mechanical group, Robocon, a university robotics team, a robotics company, or robotics support. Show us your work.
• Very strong CAD (SolidWorks, Creo, NX, Onshape, or similar), taken straight to CNC-ready drawings with tolerances.
• You know machining, sheet metal, and 3D printing well enough to pick the right process for each part.
• You design for stiffness and load, and can say where a structure will flex before you build it.
• You assemble and test what you design, and know how to source components and machining fast, ideally in Shenzhen's supply chain.
• Based in Shenzhen or ready to relocate.
• Bonus: DFM/DFA, tooling, or production experience, including injection-molded enclosures.
• Bonus: FEA, or transmissions, reducers, and bearings designed into robotic arms.
• Bonus: agentic coding tools like Claude Code or Codex are already part of your workflow.

Why Join Us

This is a rare chance to draft what robotics looks like in the physical-AI world. Your CAD designs get manufactured and deployed, so you see your own product take shape in the real world and the value it adds for people. These robots are built to go to work, folding towels or packing boxes. You'll join a small, new team, next to the deployment engineers who run models on the stations you build. Top-performing interns may receive full-time offers.