Most mechanical engineers spend their first few years at a desk — heads down in CAD, waiting for someone else to talk to the customer. If you've found yourself more energized by the client call than the design review, or you keep volunteering to be the one who explains the technical jargon to non-engineers, this role is built for people like you.
As a Solutions Design Engineer, you'll use your mechanical design background to help solve real production problems — but instead of owning one product for years, you'll work directly with customer engineering and operations teams, translate their manufacturing challenges into technical solutions, and see your work deployed on an actual factory floor within weeks or months, not years.
This is also a rare early-career path if you're curious about the business side of engineering. You'll sit at the intersection of engineering, sales, and customer success — learning how technical decisions turn into cost, yield, and business outcomes, and building the kind of cross-functional fluency that usually takes people a decade to pick up. If an MBA or a more strategic track has ever crossed your mind, this is a way to start building toward that now, while still doing real hands-on engineering.
About Instrumental:
Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.
What You'll Do:
- Learn customer manufacturing environments. Work alongside senior engineers to understand a customer's production process, technical requirements, and constraints — and start contributing to the technical solution.
- Build customer-facing skills. Join technical customer engagements, sit in on calls, and gradually take on more direct ownership of communicating technical tradeoffs — cycle time, manufacturability, cost — as you grow into the role.
- Support production-ready hardware design. Help define station placement, imaging strategy, mechanical fixtures, optics, and lighting for deployments, with guidance from experienced Solutions Engineers.
- Get hands-on with manufacturing data. Learn how customers use images, test results, BOMs, and production records — and help build that into solutions that improve visibility on the floor.
We're Looking For Someone Who Has:
- 2-3+ years of experience in mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, product design, or a related discipline
- Strong communication skills and genuine excitement about working directly with customers, not just building for them
- Exposure to electronics manufacturing or high-volume production environments
- Working CAD experience (SolidWorks, Creo, NX, or similar)
- A foundational understanding of DFM and tolerance analysis — you don't need to be an expert yet
- A builder's mindset — you'd rather figure out an ambiguous problem than wait for a fully-scoped one
- Willingness to travel occasionally to customer sites as you take on more customer-facing responsibility
Bonus Experience:
We're especially excited to talk with engineers who've had any exposure to:
- High-volume consumer electronics
- Robotics or automation
- AI server or networking hardware
- Optical systems or machine vision
We’re a growing team that consistently works collaboratively, is supportive of each other, and is highly energized by the opportunity for large impact. We actively work to promote an inclusive environment, valuing passion and the ability to learn.
You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!
The following is a representative annual overall total compensation range for this position within the Bay Area: $133,000-184,000. In addition, job level & salary opportunity is evaluated through our interview process – we review experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.
Instrumental is very proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits including: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Maternity/Paternity Leave.
At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.