Mechanical Engineer (Senior to Staff) - Sustaining

Company Overview

Driven by our vision of the affordable, reliable, net-zero carbon grid of the future, Mainspring has developed a new category of power generation — the linear generator — that delivers local, scalable, and fuel-flexible power to help accelerate the transition to the net-zero carbon grid.

The unique combination of attributes offered by Mainspring’s linear generator enables applications on both the commercial and utility sides of the meter for the $816B global electricity equipment market. We serve a wide range of Fortune 500 customers across markets and industries as well as top-tier utilities and other gridside providers.

We are looking to build relationships with people who share our values:

• Pragmatic Optimism. Building a new category of world-class power generation requires the optimism of ambition and creativity, balanced with practicality to solve problems efficiently. The challenges that arise are opportunities for growth.
• Excellence without Ego. We bring expertise and commitment to creating the best customer experience, from sales to deployment and service, just as we apply deep technical rigor to building and delivering world-class products. We strive for excellence and behave as leaders with the humility to acknowledge our challenges, both collectively and as individual contributors.
• Proactive Collaboration. The integration and cross-disciplinary nature of Mainspring’s business requires intentionally seeking out others who bring different skills, perspectives, and priorities. Our culture of inclusion and respect extends beyond our team to interactions with our partners and customers.

Mainspring is based in Menlo Park and has partnered with top-tier investors and utilities such as Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, NextEra, and American Electric Power.

Responsibilities

Mainspring is seeking a Sustaining Mechanical Engineer at the Senior or Staff Engineer levels with a focus on continuous improvements to the Linear Generator hardware. In many cases, this will involve extensive root cause analysis, creative troubleshooting, broad engineering knowledge, fast problem solving, creating and running tests, evaluating field and test data, interfacing with design team, and general project management. Ultimately, you will be asked to validate a solution and help shepherd that solution through an ECO process. Mainspring is a great place for engineers with a variety of areas of deep expertise, who like to solve challenging cross-functional problems with a mix of computational analysis, hands-on engineering and team effort.

Core responsibilities will include the following:

• Address a majority of the mechanical field failures for the Linear Generator. This will include tracking each issue over time, determining root cause, designing solutions, qualifying the changes, and pushing the changes into production / field retrofits though an ECO process
• Interface with the manufacturing and supply chain teams to address production issues. This will also include tracking each issue over time, determining root cause, designing solutions, qualifying the changes, and pushing the changes into production / field retrofits though an ECO process
• Create, optimize, and manage internal improvement systems that feed this learning back into the design process. Ideally, there are no field or production failures. You will be intimately involved with the design process as their customer and partner to eliminate as many of these issues as possible
• Work with reliability and test teams to validate systems and components with fast cycles of learning for deployment into the next generation of Linear Generators
• Collaborate cross-functionally with manufacturing engineering, NPI, and external suppliers to rapidly deploy designs into production

Qualifications

• Degree in Mechanical Engineering or a similar engineering field from an accredited institution. Experience and degree will determine level, but minimum requirements are:
• Senior Level: BS + 6 years or MS + 5 years
• Staff Level: BS + 11 years or MS + 10 years
• Able to show examples of situations where there has been extensive experience using root cause analysis to solve complex problems
• Demonstrable experience solving failures in system level designs with competing technical and functional requirements
• Good understanding of metal castings, welding/fabrication, sheet metal, machining, tolerance stack ups, CMMs, hardware component selection, and finishing processes with the ability to identify and resolve design for manufacturability issues. Deep understanding at Staff level
• Fluent in SolidWorks or comparable CAD package. Experience with using PDM or a similar CAD version control system is preferred. Proficiency with structural FEA is a plus.

The Bay Area salary for this role is $110k-$152k base + pre-IPO stock options + benefits. This position can be hybrid. The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee.