Reliability Design Engineer - Motors, Mechanisms and Electronics

Department: Hardware

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Employment Type: FullTime

Company Overview

Each year, 2.5 trillion hours are spent on household chores. At Matic, we’re on a mission to recapture that lost time, and we’re doing it by revolutionizing home robotics.

Our first product, also called Matic, is a Wall-E-esque floor cleaning robot. We've built what amounts to "full self-driving in the home” with real-time 3D mapping, adaptive path-tracking, and a precise semantic understanding of the home. Our breakthroughs in spatial AI allow Matic to work reliably in real homes, using only RGB cameras and neural networks running on-device.

Privacy First

What happens in the home, stays in the home. Our robots are private by design, with all data processing performed by the robot itself, not in the cloud.

Our Approach

Before the iPhone, consumers adopted several distinct devices; cell phones, PDAs, and portable music players each served a particular need. We believe in a similar progression for home robotics, starting with single-purpose robots and building iteratively toward more complex capabilities over time.

Our Culture

Matic is a tight-knit and collaborative team, singularly focused on building products our customers will cherish. We're ultra-hardworking people committed to solving tough problems that save precious time and energy.

About the role

As a Reliability Design Engineer, you will build the test infrastructure that lets us predict and prevent failures in the lab, before our robots ever reach a customer’s home. The mission is simple to state and hard to do: catch it here, not in the field. You will work closely with our mechanical design engineers, electrical design engineers, quality engineers, production engineers, and supply chain teams to make sure we are doing everything possible to fully test and validate every feature before we ship it.

This means pushing our designs to the extreme and building in real design margin, so that when people start depending on these robots for their daily chores and work, the robots don’t fail them. That is how we fulfill our promise of a world-class home robot people genuinely love. Your work is the difference between a customer who trusts their robot and one who doesn’t.

This is a hands-on hardware role for an engineer who likes building things that break other things. You will design, fabricate, instrument, and run the rigs, fixtures, and accelerated torture tests that reproduce real-world failure modes, push our designs past their limits, and tell us exactly where and why things break. You will model a rig in CAD, wire up the motor drivers and sensors that bring it to life, stand up the data acquisition that captures clean failure data, and write the scripts that automate it all. And you’ll do it at serious scale: we are ramping from thousands of robots today toward hundreds of thousands a year, across a fast-moving lineup of hardware versions, which means the test systems you build have to be as robust, repeatable, and scalable as the products they protect. If you want to design clever electromechanical apparatus, get your hands dirty, and have a direct line of sight from your work to a more reliable product in someone’s home, this role is for you.

What you’ll do

• Design, fabricate, and iterate electromechanical test rigs, fixtures, and automated setups that reproduce field failure modes and stress our designs to failure

• Build accelerated life, fatigue, vibration and shock, and temperature and humidity tests across motors, mechanisms, and electronics

• Wire up and integrate the actuators, motor drivers, sensors, and data acquisition that bring each test setup to life and capture clean, analyzable failure data

• Write scripts to automate test execution and data logging so tests run reliably and repeatably at volume

• Partner with reliability engineers to translate physics of failure and field insight into representative test methods

• Support root cause failure analysis by designing the apparatus and experiments that isolate failure mechanisms

• Create and maintain CAD models, drawings, and documentation for all test equipment

• Scale and maintain the reliability lab as our fleet, hardware versions, and test volume grow

• Work cross-functionally with mechanical, electrical, software, quality, production, and supply chain teams to close the loop from potential failure to design fix

What we look for

• Technical degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics, or a related hardware discipline

• 2+ years of hardware design engineering experience, ideally on a physical product that has shipped in volume

• Proven ability to build, fabricate, and rapidly iterate physical prototypes and test setups

• Proficiency in CAD

• Hands-on comfort across electromechanical systems: actuators, motor control, sensors, and basic circuit work, data acquisition, and instrumentation

• Working proficiency with a scripting language such as Python for test automation and data handling

• Exposure to reliability and test concepts such as accelerated testing, fatigue, life testing, DOE, or FMEA is a plus

• Comfort with a fast-paced, startup atmosphere where you take ownership of ambiguous problems

• High level of maturity, ownership, and pride in your work

We’d love to hear from you if...

• You are genuinely motivated to help those around you

• You are passionate about learning outside of your normal comfort zones

• You love diagnosing complex technical issues

• You are excited to do great work

Compensation:

Base: $120,000 - $200,000 per annum.

Actual Compensation will depend on skills, experience and qualifications. Base Salary is one part of the total compensation package. The role is also eligible for equity through the company’s discretionary equity program, along with a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage access to a 401(k) plan.