Rapid Prototyping Engineer — Hardware

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.

You'll own the hardware of that platform: rigid base, locking wheels, torso, camera neck, wrist mounts, all of it. The heavy variant carries industrial arms from UR, KUKA, ABB, or ROKAE. The ones we mount weigh 25 kg and more each, so the base must show absolutely no movement while both arms work. 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. You start with off-the-shelf parts, get a first version standing, and iterate as soon as it teaches you something. This team builds and tests robots that will be manufactured at scale, so you design for manufacturability from the first version.

You'll own the power and the wiring too. V1 draws from one 220 V wall cable through a converter and adapter you design, with room for two industrial power boxes. On an industrial arm the gripper is split off the arm's own control: a separate 24 V supply, and RS485/Modbus through a USB adapter into the Jetson Orin. You draw those circuit diagrams and you debug them. Beyond the stations, you'll build the next teleoperation leader arm, an encoder-based GELLO. Then V2: a wheeled base, a battery, and a 5G module for cloud inference and control reliability, figured out on the spot, like much else here.

Alongside the stations, you'll lead the scaling of our wearable first-person camera from the hundreds to the millions. It is a lightweight hat-mounted device that records how skilled work is actually done; it is not there to evaluate anyone, and privacy pauses are built into the SOP. Those recordings are the training data for our manipulation AI. This role is open to everyone from final-year undergraduates, master's and PhD students, and new grads to experienced engineers. The profile we want is simple: you build hardware because you like to, and you spend your own time doing it.

What You'll Do

• Build the station platform: rigid base for two 25 kg-plus arms, torso, camera neck and wrist mounts, wheels that lock solid.
• Run the loop fast on every part: ideate, capture requirements, CAD it, 3D-print it, send it to the CNC shop, check manufacturability.
• Own the power distribution: one 220 V wall cable through your converter, two industrial power boxes, a separate 24 V gripper supply.
• Wire each station into the Jetson Orin: four USB cameras, Ethernet or CAN-to-USB to the arms, the industrial gripper's RS485/Modbus line.
• Mount arms, cameras, and grippers on each station, get arm pose and camera placement right, and script the bring-up in Python.
• Build the next teleoperation leader arm: an encoder-based GELLO.
• Take the platform mobile for V2: wheeled base, battery, and a 5G module you set up on the spot.
• Scale the wearable first-person camera from hand-built to factory-built: DFM/DFA, BOMs, suppliers, tooling, and yield on every batch.
• Keep build logs and write the SOPs that let someone else assemble what you built.

What We're Looking For

• No hard prerequisites to apply: we hire on what you have built, not on titles.
• You build things in the physical world for fun, with a long trail of Arduino-style projects. Show us one.
• Very strong CAD (Onshape, SolidWorks, or similar) that you can take straight into a CNC shop, plus 3D printing and metal machining.
• You understand power distribution and are comfortable with a circuit diagram: 220 V in, 24 V out, and everything in between.
• Comfortable across electronics and software: you solder and crimp, read schematics, use an oscilloscope and multimeter, and script in Python.
• Quick from idea to part, quicker to the next version when the first one doesn't work.
• Based in Shenzhen or ready to relocate.
• Bonus: DFM/DFA or supplier experience, having taken a part from prototype to tooling or production.
• Bonus: CAN, Ethernet, or RS485/Modbus at the wire level, firmware on microcontrollers, or a 5G module you've set up.
• Bonus: agentic coding tools like Claude Code or Codex are already part of your workflow.

Why Join Us

Your parts will not sit in a drawer. You'll join a small new team, and the hardware of the station platform is yours from day one. Build it, put arms on it, watch it fold towels or pack boxes, then take what works to a factory. Interns earn uncapped project bonuses, and top-performing interns may receive full-time offers and the opportunity for stock options. Full-time pay is set individually, with equity case by case and accommodation included. Some interns are encouraged to pursue open-ended exploration, letting their own strengths shape what they work on. Expect Friday-night activities and regular team outings; last summer the whole team went to Hawaii. If you want the full loop from CAD to production on hardware that ships, this is it.