Description
Mechanical Engineer: Soft Goods Design
About the Role
We are seeking a Mechanical Engineer to lead the engineering, characterization, and productionization of flexible and compliant components in robotic platforms.
You will partner closely with cross-functional teams to translate material concepts into engineered subsystems that meet functional, durability, and manufacturing requirements. This role focuses on understanding how soft materials behave in dynamic mechanical systems — including fatigue, creep, hysteresis, wear, and environmental degradation — and designing assemblies that perform consistently at scale.
Responsibilities
- Design and integrate compliant or flexible materials into mechanical subsystems and rigid hardware interfaces.
- Leverage FEA tools to characterize material behavior under operational loads, including tension, compression, abrasion, fatigue, and environmental exposure.
- Develop test methods and validation protocols to evaluate durability, performance, and failure modes of soft components.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transition early prototypes into manufacturable designs.
- Source and evaluate materials in collaboration with supply chain partners and specialty fabricators.
- Work with contract manufacturers on fabrication methods such as bonding, lamination, molding, overmolding, cut-and-sew, and composite layups.
- Analyze system-level tradeoffs between compliance, durability, manufacturability, and integration constraints.
- Document material specifications, test data, and mechanical performance to support design iteration and production readiness.
- Investigate field failures and iterate designs based on observed wear patterns and performance degradation.
Requirements
- Degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent.
- Experience with A-surface and cosmetic component development
- Experience integrating soft or compliant components into robotic, wearable, medical, automotive, or industrial hardware systems.
- Familiarity with environmental or durability testing (abrasion, ingress, cyclic loading, UV, temperature).
- Experience working with contract manufacturers or specialty fabricators.
- Familiarity with material characterization methods for flexible materials.
- Experience transitioning flexible-material prototypes into production designs.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that can be used to improve people's lives and solve complex problems.