Mechanical Engineer

About the role

You will design mechanical hardware at a company building commercial food service equipment that runs sixteen hours a day in harsh kitchen environments full of heat, steam, grease, and daily chemical washdowns. Your parts must be strong enough for constant use, cleanable to food-safety standards, and cheap enough to manufacture at scale without eroding margins. You will own components and subassemblies from concept sketches through production release, proving your designs with analysis and testing before they ever reach a customer kitchen.

What you will achieve

• Deliver production-ready mechanical designs for sheet metal, plastic, and machined components, releasing at least three major parts or assemblies per product cycle with complete drawings and documentation.
• Prove designs with hand calculations and FEA before prototyping, cutting prototype iterations significantly by catching structural, tolerance, and thermal issues on paper first.
• Achieve first-pass manufacturing approval on the majority of your parts through disciplined DFM: correct bend radii, draft angles, wall thicknesses, and tolerances matched to each process capability.
• Drive measurable cost out of mature designs through material substitution, part consolidation, and process changes, delivering BOM savings every year without quality regressions.
• Build and test prototypes yourself in the shop, documenting results with photos, data, and clear conclusions that give the team confidence to commit tooling dollars.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2 to 5 years of mechanical design experience with parts or products that shipped to real customers.
• Strong 3D CAD skills and the ability to produce clean, fully dimensioned 2D drawings with correct GD&T that shops build from accurately.
• Solid mechanics fundamentals: statics, mechanics of materials, basic thermal understanding, and the judgment to know when hand calcs suffice.
• Experience with at least two manufacturing processes (sheet metal, injection molding, machining, casting) including their design rules.
• Hands-on prototyping experience and genuine comfort working in a shop environment with mills, 3D printers, and hand tools.
• BS in Mechanical Engineering or equivalent.

Nice-to-haves

• FEA experience with ANSYS or SolidWorks Simulation applied to structural problems on shipping parts.
• Familiarity with stainless steel fabrication, food-safe materials, and hygienic design practices.
• Experience working with overseas suppliers on tooling development and production qualification.
• Knowledge of corrosion-resistant finishes and fastener selection for washdown environments.