---
title: 'Senior Mechanical Engineer at Cosmic Robotics'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mechanical-engineer-cosmic-robotics-cosmic-hq-2w629jx4fpjh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Senior Mechanical Engineer at Cosmic Robotics

- **Company:** Cosmic Robotics
- **Location:** Cosmic Hq
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cosmic-robotics/202fcf8a-48d1-40b5-a142-c1d63713ce2d

## Job description

Senior Mechanical Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (full time, in-person)

Company Overview

Our mission is to build a city on Mars and accelerate the construction of critical infrastructure on Earth. Starting with Cosmic-1 – a system that installs solar panels 10x faster than today’s methods, helping us transition to a clean energy future and laying the groundwork for the future of autonomous construction.

## The Role

As a Senior Mechanical Engineer, you will own a critical Cosmic-1 subsystem and lead development from concept to deployment. As a core member of the team, you will help define the era of autonomous construction.

This is a rare opportunity to:

- Work on hard, meaningful problems that impact the future of infrastructure and energy.
- Collaborate with a world-class team from NASA, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Built Robotics, and others.
- Rapidly grow, learn, and lead within a quickly scaling company.

## Responsibilities

- Own hardware components and systems such as primary and secondary structures, mechanisms, and enclosures
- Full product lifecycle ownership from requirements collection, trade studies, preliminary and detailed design, structural analysis, and overseeing manufacturing, integration, testing, and customer delivery
- Work with manufacturing, electrical, software, and product engineers to develop innovative new solutions to complex interdisciplinary problems
- Work with vendors and suppliers to find creative solutions to tight deadlines
- Set milestones, plan roadmaps, and deliver on ambitious timelines
- Recruit, mentor, and build a world-class engineering organization

## Requirements

- 3+ years of professional engineering experience
- Excellent first-principles understanding of statics, dynamics, heat transfer, materials, and corrosion
- Expert mechanical design skills using CAD software such as Solidworks, NX, PTC Creo, etc. and FEA analysis with ANSYS
- Strong understanding of designing for manufacturing processes such as CNC milling/lathing, sheet metal bending, welding, and 3D printing
- Excellent communication and project management skills
- Thrive in fast-paced environments and push boundaries to meet deadlines

Bonus

- 5+ years of professional engineering experience in mechanical design
- Experience designing or developing high volume large form factor products like automobiles and construction equipment
- Experience in mechanical design of ultrahigh reliability products like spacecraft and medical devices
- Management and recruiting experience

## About Cosmic Robotics

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cosmic Robotics builds autonomous construction equipment for critical infrastructure, starting with a robot that installs solar panels on utility-scale farms.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed stage, $4M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: ~2024
- **Founders**: James Emerick (Co-founder & CEO) and Lewis C Jones (Co-founder, CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Robotics Engineering, Autonomous Construction Equipment, Solar Energy Infrastructure
- Target customers: Solar farm developers, data center operators, general contractors building grid-scale renewable energy, storage, and other critical infrastructure.
- Mission: "Build tools to unlock essential progress on critical infrastructure" by creating rugged, reliable autonomous systems that amplify human capability on the job site. [cosmicrobotics.com](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/careers)

## Products & Services
- **[Cosmic-1A]**: An autonomous eight-wheeled vehicle equipped with a robotic arm, suction cups, high-accuracy GPS, and cameras. It tows a trailer of solar panels, lifts and places each panel (weighing up to 90 lbs) onto racking with millimeter precision at a rate of one panel every 30–40 seconds—matching the speed of the fastest human installers but sustaining that pace longer without fatigue. Workers still oversee and fasten panels. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmic-robotics-is-building-robots-to-speed-solar-power-deployments-for-data-centers/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $4.0M across two pre-seed rounds (2024-2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investor Giant Ventures; Participating investors HCVC, MaC Ventures; Angel investors include Azeem Azhar, Aarthi Ramamurthy, and Nate Williams. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmic-robotics-is-building-robots-to-speed-solar-power-deployments-for-data-centers/)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Headcount grew 100% YoY to 9 employees (as of mid-2025). [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cosmic-robotics)
  - Robot performance equals fastest human installers with higher endurance; plans to manufacture several production units by end of 2025.
  - Awarded NASA funding to develop "Particle AI" for lunar construction, indicating cross-planetary ambitions. [cosmicrobotics.com](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real‑world focus**: The robot is engineered for harsh outdoor conditions (rain, snow, mud, 120°F heat) and iterated directly with customers on actual job sites rather than in simulation. [cosmicrobotics.com](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/careers)
- **Team pedigree**: Founders and early engineers come from SpaceX, NASA, Google, Built Robotics, Nuro, and other industry leaders, bringing aerospace rigor and startup speed. [cosmicrobotics.com](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/careers)
- **Timely market need**: A severe labor shortage in solar installation (expected 48% growth in installer demand by 2033) combined with surging data center electricity demand makes automation a critical enabler. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmic-robotics-is-building-robots-to-speed-solar-power-deployments-for-data-centers/)

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities: Scaling from prototype to production – manufacturing multiple Cosmic-1A units and deploying them in live solar construction environments.
- Long‑term direction: Expand to other critical infrastructure (grid‑scale storage, data centers, transportation) and eventually support off‑world construction (NASA collaboration). [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmic-robotics-is-building-robots-to-speed-solar-power-deployments-for-data-centers/)

## Why Work Here
- Culture emphasizes speed with integrity: "Move with urgency, but build with care." The team values tangible impact over feature bloat, working directly on physical systems that solve real problems. [cosmicrobotics.com](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/careers)
- Work is hands‑on: Design, test, and deploy robots in the field (rain, snow, deserts); not a simulation‑only environment.
- Office/hybrid policy: Likely on‑site in San Francisco (headquarters with multiple offices in the city), with active hiring for in‑person robotics roles.
- Currently posting one opening for **Robotics Software Engineer** (as of July 2025). [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cosmic-robotics)
- Notable perks for engineers: Chance to work on end‑to‑end autonomy, mechanical design, and productionization with a small, fast‑moving team; direct exposure to co‑founders and customers.

## Sources
1. [cosmicrobotics.com – Official Website](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/)
2. [cosmicrobotics.com – Careers Page](https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/careers)
3. [linkedin.com – Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cosmic-robotics)
4. [techcrunch.com – “Cosmic Robotics’ robots could speed up solar panel deployments”](https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmic-robotics-is-building-robots-to-speed-solar-power-deployments-for-data-centers/)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com – Cosmic Robotics Job Board](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cosmic-robotics)

## Other roles at Cosmic Robotics

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