Manufacturing Quality Engineer

Company Description

Roboligent is an Austin-based robotics company building Robin — a force-controlled bimanual mobile manipulator for warehouse and industrial work. Our patent-pending actuators give robots human-like sensitivity, so they work alongside people instead of behind cages. Robin is deployed with real customers today, on real production floors.

The engineering team is small and the scope is focused. Work ships to real robots in real customer environments within days, not quarters.

Role Description

We build Robin one at a time today. Within a year we need to build a hundred a year, and the difference between those two things is almost entirely process, supplier control, and inspection.

You are the first quality engineer at Roboligent, and for now the whole function. In the near term you own a pilot build — a small batch on a frozen design, built the way production will build them, with documented work instructions and real build-hour and yield numbers coming out the other end. Then you own quality through the ramp.

Four of our thirteen known failure modes trace to the quality of purchased components; three trace to how we build. Every one is preventable with process design, and none has been prevented, because nobody has owned it. That is the job.

What you'll own

• Supplier quality — qualifying and monitoring vendors, incoming inspection, driving formal corrective action to closure
• Build process and work instructions — assembly documentation, inspection points, torque and fastener specs, poka-yoke
• The pilot build — running it, documenting it, producing defensible build-hours-per-unit and first-pass-yield numbers
• Run-in and pre-service screening for every unit before it ships
• Failure investigation and corrective action — root-cause work, the non-conformance workflow, keeping the failure-mode catalogue current
• Getting known fixes into controlled documents — you don't own the design change, but you own the loop until it lands
• Reliability measurement as the fleet grows — parts-replacement records, MTBF, per-unit uptime

What this role is not

• You do not own mechanical design — you raise and drive changes; the design engineer makes them.
• You do not build the monitoring system — you are its customer.
• You do not own CE marking — that sits with a contractor and our production engineer.
• You are not the assembly organization — contract labour builds; you direct, inspect, and document.
• You do not have unilateral authority to hold a build or reject an incoming shipment — you recommend, and the Engineering Lead decides.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in manufacturing quality, supplier quality, or process engineering for electromechanical products
• Direct supplier quality experience: qualifying vendors, writing incoming inspection criteria, driving corrective action to closure
• Experience taking a product from low-volume build into repeatable production
• Structured root-cause methodology (8D, 5-Why, fishbone) applied to real failures
• Able to read mechanical drawings and electrical schematics fluently
• Useful, not required: run-in/burn-in screen design, reliability methods (Weibull, MTBF), ISO 9001, CE marking familiarity, overseas supplier management, ASQ CQE
• Degrees are useful signal, not a requirement

Location

Based in Austin, Texas, on site with the engineering team. Hands-on floor role, not remote-eligible. Occasional supplier travel, domestic and potentially international, at a low cadence.

Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship, now or in the future.

Process

About three weeks end to end, with feedback after every stage: an intro call with our CEO, a writing sample (a work instruction, inspection spec, or 8D report you wrote), a technical conversation with the engineering team, a compensated half-day on-site session with a real defect, final conversations, and references.