Staff Mechatronics Engineer

About Light Materials

Frontier technologies demand parts that handle ever-greater power densities—think hypersonics, fusion, and chip cooling. But the best materials for the job resist melting and cutting, leaving the most sophisticated designs practically unmanufacturable. Light Materials is scaling up a solution: a reimagined process that yields complex parts directly from gas, in shapes and materials nobody else can produce. Our small team is currently building out a first-of-a-kind facility and shipping demo parts to early customers.

The role

This is a rare opportunity to build hardware that has never existed before. As our staff mechatronics engineer, you’ll own core subsystems of a novel production process—machines with no playbook and no off-the-shelf equivalents, and wide-open room for creative engineering. You’ll take your designs from bench prototype all the way to the production floor, see them running within weeks rather than years, and keep pushing them further as our machines grow in scale and ambition—all alongside world-class experts who are as obsessed with this problem as you are.

What you'll do

• Invent and build machines that exist nowhere else: novel roboticized laser reactors, specialized vacuum chambers for extreme process conditions, and custom scientific equipment
• Instrument a brand-new production process end to end—safety systems, sensors, and data pipelines that turn a neat idea into a real factory
• Design the control interfaces our operators rely on every day, and watch your work shape how the entire facility runs
• Sharpen your designs in daily collaboration with subject-matter experts in materials science, process engineering, and applications—people you’ll learn from constantly, and who will lean on your expertise in turn

What we're looking for

• B.S. or M.S. in mechanical, electrical, or mechatronic engineering with 10 years of industry experience
• Expert mechanical prototyping skills (CAD, simulation, testing)
• Comfort designing and debugging your own circuit boards
• Experience with motion control/robotics
• Strong programming skills in Python and on embedded targets, with fluency in Git-based workflows
• Strong technical fundamentals
• A track record of taking ambitious engineering projects from first sketch to working hardware
• Genuine excitement about building something completely new as part of a small, fast-moving, deeply interdisciplinary team

Nice to have experience with

• Machine vision
• Laser optics
• Thermal or fluid simulations
• Industrial processes at high temperature, high pressure, or vacuum

Logistics

All employees work in person at our R&D lab in Sunnyvale, CA. Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and full benefits.