Product Design Engineer/ Senior Mechanical Engineer

ABOUT US:

Help us bring pregnancy into the 21st century and save the lives of millions of babies lost to preventable causes.

Project Stardust aims to save the lives of the babies lost in childbirth or late-stage pregnancy to causes that could be prevented with actionable signals about fetal growth and well-being. The problem is urgent: Stillbirths are the leading cause of infant mortality (~24,000/yr in the U.S, 1 in 150 births); many involve mechanisms where earlier detection has been proven to change outcomes. Yet only a small fraction of parents get additional monitoring and scans in their final trimester, because these are currently done in hospitals that are already overloaded and overworked. As a result, for example more than 70% of stillborn babies with growth restriction are not diagnosed until after birth.

We are building affordable, comfortable and intuitive smart belly bands that use sensor-fusion and AI-workflows to provide parents with individualized growth curves, monitor fetal movement, track fetal heart rate, measure blood flow in the umbilical cord and placenta, and provide timely alerts to seek care. The underlying technologies have all already been validated clinically - we just need to assemble them into a compelling and easy-to-use product.

Project Stardust is a 7 person team (growing rapidly!), including two serial founders with consumer hardware experience, a Stanford professor specialising in using ML on noisy datasets, and two clinicians who are experts in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and commercializing medical devices. Founded by parents who have lost a child to stillbirth, there is no-one better positioned to address this problem.

More information can be found at www.project-stardust.org

THE ROLE:

We are seeking a highly motivated and adaptable individual who will explore the peaks and valleys of all problems that may come up while building a first-of-its-kind wearable for pregnancy.

Our small team is exceptional at prototyping and invention; your job will be to own detailed designs to help get them ready to be scaled, manufactured and sent to consumers. We are a flat team, where everyone contributes directly to product development, as such this will start as an IC role.

Some of the specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Own core CAD for critical sub-assemblies for our new product - from architecture, design, mass optimisation, design-for-manufacturing, tolerance analysis, implementation, testing, through commercialization
• Own and manage vendor relationships (including selection and travel to Asia) and over time cost-reduction processes
• Drive engineering specifications from product requirements and work cross functionally
• Select materials and manufacturing processes that meet product volume, performance, and durability requirements
• Lead cross-functional design reviews
• Develop specifications, requirements, test methods and protocols through formal verification to ensure functionality, safety and efficacy of design
• Write technical documentation and assembly instructions to ensure seamless knowledge transfer to manufacturing partners
• Bring joy to the team, participate in embarrassing team events, tolerate the founders’ terrible music choices

Qualifications:

• 5+ years’ experience in mechanical engineering in a professional setting
• Excellence in CAD design and software (SolidWorks, PDM)
• Expertise designing parts for a broad range of manufacturing processes, such as plastic injection molding, machining, casting, etc.
• Experience in mechanical analysis including geometric, dimensioning and tolerancing,, static and dynamic analysis, FEA and thermal analysis
• Experience in DFM and a passion for making complex designs more practical and scalable. Ideally experience with a scaled consumer or medical product
• Experience with Asian-based NPI, willingness to travel
• Experience with consumer electronics
• Experience with compliance and regulatory standards FDA, CE, etc.
• Able to deliver quality work in a fast-paced startup environment
• Ability to relocate to work at the Project Stardust Bay Area office
• Sense of humour, tolerant of Aussie & British spelling
• Personal motivation to improve maternal and fetal health
• Swiftie / good taste in background music :)

This is a full time position working at the Project Stardust office space in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting immediately.

Project Stardust is an equal opportunity employer. Our hiring decisions are based on need and competence to satisfy said need. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected status.

Any and all offers of employment extended by Project Stardust are conditional on candidates’ ability to provide satisfactory proof of eligibility to maintain full-time employment in the United States. Unfortunately Project Stardust cannot sponsor visas at this time.