Senior Mechanical Engineer

The Role

Our sensor mounts to the roof of a customer's vehicle and stays there through winters, potholes, and the occasional car wash. The people installing it are usually DPW crews, not engineers, and it still has to come back with clean data. As our Senior Mechanical Engineer, you'll own the enclosure, chassis, thermal path, sealing, and mounting system, plus the drawings and documentation that let someone else build it correctly a thousand times. This is a hands-on design role with real ownership as we scale into production.

What You'll Do

• Take the sensor from concept to production with our electrical, firmware, and perception engineers, including a mounting system a non-specialist can install on a wide range of vehicles without damaging them.
• Prove the design survives real life: structural and thermal simulation, vibration and shock, ingress, and environmental testing.
• Produce the drawings, GD&T, models, and BOMs that let someone who has never met you build it correctly, and own the lifecycle process that keeps the released design and the built unit in agreement.
• Lead the move from machined parts and in-house builds to tooling and contract manufacturing: DFM with molders and CMs, assembly documentation, fixtures, tolerance strategy, and FAI.
• Troubleshoot mechanical issues across design, build, and field, raise unit reliability, and hold the line on safety, quality, and cost as we scale.

What You Bring

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering or a related field, with 3-7 years of experience, ideally in robotics, automation, automotive, or ruggedized electronics
• Cradle-to-grave design experience with precision-machined and molded parts (SolidWorks preferred; OnShape, Creo, or similar is fine)
• Experience designing for CNC machining, molded plastics, and 3D printing, and comfort picking up sheet metal or weldments when a part calls for it
• Parts taken to tooling and shipped, designed for the mold rather than just in plastic: draft, parting lines and gates, shrink and warp, ejection, and resin choice for years of sun and road grime
• Direct work with molders and tool shops through DFM review, tool kickoff, first shots, and tuning
• Comfort building, testing, and iterating on functional prototypes by hand
• Experience with tolerance stackups, FAI review, and DFMEAs, and following designs through engineering builds, production builds, and the field
• Revision control, change orders, and deviations managed in a PLM system or a disciplined equivalent
• Thermal management of electronics inside sealed enclosures, and sealing to a real IP rating
• Strong judgment on design, performance, and logistical tradeoffs, and clear technical documentation

Nice to Have

• Enclosures for a standard autonomy stack: cameras, GNSS, LiDAR, IMUs, and edge compute
• Vehicle-mounted or automotive accessory hardware, including roof-rack, rail, and magnetic mounts
• Optical window design, sealing, and keeping glass clean in a road environment
• An eye for beautiful, well-designed components, with finish, texture, parting lines, and fit that read as premium
• Taking hardware from low-volume in-house assembly to contract-manufactured production
• Hardware deployed into government, public-sector, or other regulated environments
• A portfolio or photos of hardware you've designed; we'd rather see the parts than read about them

Why Cyvl

• Hard tech.
• Real streets.
• Your name on it.

• Hard problems in the real world. You build end-to-end: our own hardware, software and AI, with work that shows up on the street in the real world.
• Ownership that compounds. You own outcomes, not tasks. You work directly with customers and across our team, and you'll own more, sooner, than almost anywhere else.
• Intense, with heart. We're building a category, so it's not a place to coast. We also take care of each other, have genuine fun together, and believe in what we are doing.

What We Ask

• Cross lanes. "Not my job" doesn't exist here.
• Own without a playbook. The plan is still being written, often by you.
• Try, miss, try again. We make big bets. Some won't land, and we learn fast.
• Be in the room. We're on-site in Somerville about 90% of the time.

We're a startup building a category. If that sounds like the draw, not the risk, we'd love to talk.

Benefits

• Equity. You'll own a piece of what you're building.
• Health, dental, and vision. Cyvl covers most of the premium for you and your family.
• 401k with a real match, vested day one. Your money is yours from the start.
• Generous PTO & Paid Parental leave. Doing hard work well includes stepping away from it.
• Learning stipend. Spend it on whatever makes you sharper.
• Paid to live close. A monthly bonus for living near our Boston office.
• Team events. Time together in Boston with a team you’ll love working with.

See Our Work

• How Atlanta cut downtown potholes by 60%
• How Buffalo turned a campaign promise into a paving plan
• How to rebuild US infrastructure smarter

We build for every community, so we hire from all of them. The best people for this work come from different backgrounds, paths, and places, and many of them don't check every box. If this role excites you, apply anyway. If you need an adjustment to our interview process, tell us and we'll make it work.