Mechanical & Hardware Engineer at 7th Unit
ABOUT 7TH UNIT
7th Unit is building a humanoid robot platform for the labor markets in Europe and Asia. We have signed LOIs from industrial operators and a clear 12-month milestone: a working robot operating inside a paying customer facility.
We are not building toward a demo. We are building toward a deployed robot. This is one of four founding engineering roles. The team you join defines the architecture. The decisions made in the first 90 days will be in production in month ten.
THE ROLE
You own the physical robot. That means the arm architecture, actuator selection, structural design, gripper system, and power architecture — including our hot-swap battery system for multi-shift continuous operation. You are the person who knows what breaks in the real world versus what breaks in simulation, and you design for the former.
V1 is a wheeled upper-humanoid: full torso, dual arms, dexterous multi-finger hands, mounted on a wheeled base. First deployment is intra-factory material transfer — picking standardized containers of 5–15 kg and placing them at line-side stations across a flat factory floor. The object set is constrained. The environment is structured. Your job is to make the hardware work reliably for 20+ hours a day.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
Arm and actuator architecture: define the degrees of freedom, actuator types, and mechanical design for v1
Gripper design: build a force-sensing gripper optimized for our first deployment object set, with a clear upgrade path
Hot-swap battery system: design the mechanical and power architecture that enables continuous multi-shift operation without shutdown
Structural design and manufacturing: design for real-world durability, field serviceability, and eventual volume manufacturing
First 90 days deliverable: working manipulation prototype validated against the object set in our manufacturing LOI
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
3+ years designing and shipping physical robotic systems that left the lab — arms, mobile platforms, or end-effectors
Hands-on experience with actuator selection, motor control integration, and mechanical failure modes under real operating conditions
Background at a company where hardware shipped and operated in a real environment: Boston Dynamics, Tesla Optimus, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed, or equivalent
Comfortable making architecture decisions under uncertainty and iterating fast on physical hardware
Experience designing for field serviceability — you think about what happens when the robot fails at 2am in a customer facility
COMPENSATION & STRUCTURE
Salary: $120,000+ (post-round close, market-rate for your location)
Equity: Meaningful founding engineer equity, negotiated directly — this is not a standard hire package
Structure: Founding engineer. You own the hardware architecture. The broader team scales from the foundation you build.
Location: Remote during pre-deployment phase. Relocation to team hub (Eastern Europe or Central Asia) as the build phase begins.
WHY THIS, WHY NOW
Every well-capitalized competitor — Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Tesla Optimus — is chasing BMW, Amazon, and the US Department of Defense. The markets we are entering have no funded competitor deploying at scale. We have operator LOIs before the product exists. The window is finite and it is open now.
If you have spent years at a large robotics company shipping hardware that other people defined, and you want to define the architecture yourself — this is the role.