Manufacturing Design Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Manufacturing Design Engineer to own the ongoing quality and process health of our Gen 1 product. This role is end-to-end: you identify the problem, run the failure analysis, design the fix, validate it, and close the loop in production. You'll be splitting time between our SF office and our manufacturing partners in China, and you'll be the single point of accountability for sustaining changes, vendor process improvements, and production tooling across our FATP and Tier 2 supply chain. This role requires being a design and manufacturing engineer.

What You'll Own

• Own the full sustaining change lifecycle: problem identification → failure analysis → corrective action → design → validation → production implementation
• Design mechanical components as needed — injection molded plastics, sheet metal, and similar — to resolve field failures or address process gaps
• Drive process improvements at FATP and Tier 2 vendors, including designing, reviewing, and implementing testers, fixtures, and jigs for IQC, IPQC, and OQC stations
• Use production yield data, field return rates, and process metrics to build data-driven justifications for specific design and process changes — you quantify problems before proposing solutions
• Set up and run workbench experiments and DOEs to evaluate corrective actions, including thermal, mechanical, and process-level characterizations
• Work directly and on-site with manufacturing vendors in China to root cause failures, improve process consistency, and qualify changes
• Own part lifecycle and change management: define rollout timelines, coordinate across supply chain, and ensure changes land cleanly in production
• Analyze customer returns and field data to drive prioritization

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of mechanical engineering experience with meaningful time in a manufacturing or sustaining role — not just NPI
• Strong mechanical design skills across injection molded plastics, sheet metal, and production tooling including test fixtures, jigs, and functional testers
• Demonstrated ability to use data to drive decisions: yield trends, SPC, field return analysis, or similar — you can look at a dataset and know what it's telling you and what to do about it
• Hands-on experience working with FATP and Tier 2 contract manufacturers, ideally in Asia
• Comfortable building quick experiments: setting up test rigs, instrumenting assemblies, running DOEs, interpreting results
• Strong failure analysis instincts — you form hypotheses, design tests, and reach defensible conclusions
• Experienced in ECO and change management processes — you understand the downstream implications of a change and plan rollouts accordingly
• Willingness to travel to China regularly (estimated 30–40% of time)
• Proficient in CAD (we use Onshape)
• Fluent in English; Mandarin fluency is a significant advantage and strongly preferred

Why This Role

Manufacturing Design Engineering here is a critical role to achieving scale at speed. You will single-handedly bridge the gap between NPI and Operations. Your fingerprints will be on yield improvements, field return reductions, and manufacturing industrialization. If you want ownership and direct impact on a physical product in production, this is it.