About the role
Spring is a nonprofit venture platform building and backing companies that improve animal welfare at scale.
Spring Works, Spring's in-house technology group, designs, prototypes, and welfare-validates the devices the ecosystem needs but no vendor supplies. These technologies are then handed off to our incubated companies for deployment.
The equipment you build is the foundation of better welfare for billions of animals. These machines will be placed on farms, at fisheries, at aquaculture sites, in land-based processing plants, and on boats at sea. Equipment you might work on includes stunning systems for fish and crustaceans, aquaculture water quality and actuation systems, and farm robots, with new categories added as the ecosystem presents a need.
Spring Works products have to run reliably in wet, corrosive, moving environments, often thousands of miles from our shop. Some will run standalone and others in conjunction with equipment already on site. They have to be safe for the people operating them, who may have had minimal training. We design in remote diagnostics and instrumentation from the start. What we hand over to an incubated company is a field-deployable prototype, built to survive real production conditions and to return evidence of how it performed.
We're hiring a Senior Mechatronics Engineer to work across the mechanical, electrical, and controls sides of the team as we design and build our machines. You will need real competence in both domains, and you will own the selection, design, and assembly of the subsystems that bring servo and stepper motors, pneumatics, linear actuators, and other motion hardware together.
You bring deep competence in electromechanical design and are ready to design complex mechanical and electrical systems in CAD on large projects, working under the guidance of the Senior Mechanical Design Engineer. You are the bridge between the mechanical team and the controls engineer, and at this level you own the electromechanical architecture rather than executing someone else's.
You should be able to operate without oversight from management, and to judge when to seek input and when to decide on your own, as well as to delegate effectively to junior engineers and contractors. You must have a collaborative mindset and demonstrate sound decision-making and judgment.
What you'll do
- Own the electromechanical architecture
- Define how the machine achieves the motion it needs, and work with the controls and mechanical leads to fold your choices into the overall machine concept.
- Make and defend the trade-offs: servo versus stepper versus pneumatic, direct drive versus gearbox, belt versus ballscrew, integrated versus discrete drive, and where a sensor goes and what type it should be.
- Work from requirements down to individual component selection, and speak up early when a component forces an architectural change.
Motion and actuation
- Select and size motors, actuators, gearboxes, bearings, drives, and encoders. Run the calculations yourself, torque and duty cycle, thermal limits, acceleration profiles, current and load draw, and document the reasoning behind each choice.
- Design and specify pneumatic circuits: cylinder bore and stroke, valves and manifolds, regulators, flow controls, cushioning, air prep, and tubing runs. Size for force, speed, and cycle time.
- Design end-effectors, grippers, and tooling with their actuation and sensing integrated.
- Specify sensors, including photoelectric, inductive proximity, magnetic reed, vision, load cells, encoders, and pressure and vacuum switches, and own their mounting and alignment.
- Wiring and electrical integration
- Design and build physical wiring harnesses, specifying and achieving wire gauge, connector selection, routing through moving joints, strain relief, cable carriers, flex-rated cable, and shielding and grounding practice.
- Produce or review wiring schematics and interconnect diagrams for the electromechanical portions of the machine.
- Source motion components, including motors, drives, sensors, connectors, cables, and pneumatic hardware, and manage the vendors who supply them.
- Own the electromechanical side of the BOM and its revision control.
Mechanical design and CAD
- Produce 3D models, detailed drawings with proper GD&T, managed tolerance stack-ups, and BOMs for the assemblies you own.
- Make confident decisions on design trade-offs, material selection, mechanism functionality with limited prototyping, cost reduction, and machine aesthetics.
- Understand manufacturing processes and how they drive design decisions, including machining, welding, sheet metal fabrication, laser and waterjet cutting, and additivemanufacturing.
Prototype, test, and debug
- Bring real hand fabrication and assembly skill to prototyping and machine builds, working under the guidance of the lead Mechanical Engineer.
- Own testing and debug for every system you designed or selected, including limit switch calibration, achieving repeatability, and running down whatever goes wrong.
- Anything that falls cleanly into neither mechanical nor controls is yours.
- Support installation, commissioning, and field issues at customer sites.
Interface with controls
- Work closely with the Controls Engineer to divide the work during design and assembly. You should be able to read a PLC program well enough to argue about it, and to understand I/O, interlocks, and machine control architecture — though you are not the one architecting or certifying the control system.
- Collaborate on the device list, and make sure everything you have selected is fully understood by the lead Controls Engineer.
Raise the bar around you
- Set and document electromechanical design standards, including component libraries, preferred vendors, harnessing conventions, and sizing methodology.
- Set the mechatronics standards now, mentor junior mechatronics engineers as the team grows.
- Lead design reviews and vendor technical discussions.
What we're looking for
- BS in Mechanical, Mechatronics, Robotics, or Electrical Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
- 5+ years designing and building electromechanical systems or automation equipment.
- Strong 3D CAD skills, SolidWorks preferred, with a working background in GD&T and tolerance stack-ups.
- Experience selecting motion components such as servo and stepper motors, pneumatic components, and linear actuators, and the ability to justify those choices with real calculations.
- Pneumatic system design experience, with a demonstrated ability to specify the right components for a circuit, including directional control valves, air prep, regulators, and mufflers.
- Hands-on wiring experience on automation equipment, including complex harness construction, clean routing that avoids stress, and difficult paths through moving joints.
- Experience selecting sensors, specifying their placement in the mechanical design, and integrating them with the control system.
- Practical familiarity with controls hardware, including PLCs, industrial I/O, safety circuits, and interlocks.
- Hands-on fabrication and prototyping skill: hand and powered fabrication tools, basic machining, 3D printing, soldering, assembly, and bench instruments such as a multimeter, scope, and power supply.
- Testing and debug experience, using cross-domain knowledge to find and fix problems on real machines.
- Willing to be on-site and on the floor. This is not a remote role.
- Comfortable in a working shop, able to lift 50 lbs and stand for extended periods of time.
Nice to have
- Equipment designed for wet, washdown, or corrosive environments.
- Aquaculture, agricultural, animal processing, or food processing equipment exposure.
- Time at a custom automation integrator, machine builder, capital equipment company, or hardware startup.
- Industrial communications: EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, CANopen, Modbus, IO-Link.
- eCAD: AutoCAD Electrical, SolidWorks Electrical, EPLAN, or Altium/KiCad for board-level work.
- Robot integration and end-of-arm tooling design (FANUC, ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa, UR).
- Machine safeguarding: safety relays, light curtains, interlocks, and E-stop circuits, with literacy in ISO 13849, NFPA 79, or ANSI/RIA 15.06.
- Remote diagnostics, telemetry, or connected-fleet experience on equipment deployed far from the shop.
- Working knowledge of Python or another relevant programming language.
- Customer-site commissioning and validation experience.
Spring is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, sex, pregnancy, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status, reproductive health decision-making, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
