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