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Mechanical Engineer
Aquabyte
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on May 3, 2025
Aquabyte is seeking a Mechanical Engineer to drive the development, testing, and delivery of quality hardware products enabling cutting-edge analytics and automation of fish farms around the world.
This position follows a hybrid schedule, with two (2) days per week in our San Francisco office and three (3) days working remotely from home.
Our mission
Aquabyte is on a mission to revolutionize the sustainability and efficiency of aquaculture. It is an audacious, and incredibly rewarding mission. By making fish farming cheaper and more viable than livestock production, we aim to mitigate one of the biggest causes of climate change and help prepare our planet for impending population growth. Aquaculture is the single fastest growing food-production sector in the world, and now is the time to define how technology is used to harvest the sea for generations to come.
We are a diverse, mission-driven team that is eager to work alongside kindred spirits. If this vision makes you smile, gives you goosebumps, or otherwise inspires you please get in touch.
Our product
We are currently focused on helping Norwegian salmon farmers better understand their fish populations and make environmentally-sound decisions. Through custom underwater cameras, computer vision, and machine learning we are able to quantify fish weights, detect sea lice infestations, and generate optimal feeding plans in real time. Our product operates at three levels: on-site hardware for image capture, cloud pipelines for data processing, and a user-facing web application. As a result, there are hundreds of moving pieces and no shortage of fascinating challenges across all levels of the stack.
Above all, Aquabyte is a customer-driven company. Our product development is dictated by the needs of fish farmers and we prioritize customer delight in everything we do. We are committed to build a global, collaborative team that creates value far beyond Silicon Valley.
The role
Aquabyte is producing industry-leading hardware products to enable analytics from optical and real-world sensors deployed underwater in industrial fish farms and additionally enabling robotic automation of farm tasks. This hardware is deployed in some of the most harsh operating conditions on earth for electronics and sensors and is difficult to access once deployed.
Your role is to produce quality hardware on-schedule and within budget to meet customer needs. You will involve and manage contract mechanical designers, iterate on existing designs, and develop new concepts for research, manufacturing automation, and enterprise product lines. You will challenge mechanical engineering decisions to enhance the quality, manufacturability, and cost of hardware. You will work with the product team to ensure hardware meets customer expectations.
You will be part of the Hardware Engineering org working closely with the embedded system team. This role is particularly ambitious within an already ambitious company; we hope you enjoy challenges.
Responsibilities
- New product mechanical design of underwater enclosure
- Enhancements and cost reduction alternatives for hardware products
- Management of mechanical design consultants
- Design review of critical components
- Lead selection of 3rd party manufacturer of hardware components
- On-time and within-budget delivery of hardware products
- Ensure regulatory compliance for hardware is met in various geographies
- Improve quality control processes and hardware testability
- Stabilize prototype to production development of new hardware products
- Improve lifetime of products through failure analysis and evolving environmental testing procedures
- Improve manufacturability and simplicity of hardware products
- Ensure quality, documented, and correctly-attended meetings between research, design, software, and manufacturing stakeholders
- Design for fail-safe operation
Minimum Qualifications
- 4+ years of mechanical engineering experience bringing products from CAD ideas to market
- 2+ years experience interfacing with contract manufacturers
- 2+ years experience with injection molding
- Bachelor’s Mechanical Engineering degree
Bonus Qualifications
- Masters Mechanical Engineering degree
- Experience developing underwater or marine-environment products
- Experience developing agricultural and/or food-safe products
- Experience developing optical products
Employee Benefits
- Competitive salaries and generous equity
- Flexible working hours + hybrid work policy
- Best medical, vision, & dental insurance plans
- 401K matching plan
- Travel to Norway
- Evolve in a fast-paced environment
- Be able to shape a business in its early stages
- Get ideas, feedback, and suggestions from other best-in-their-field colleagues
- Mentorship opportunities, we'll be dedicated to investing in you and supporting you as you grow
Aquabyte is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, and is supported by NEA, Costanoa Ventures, and many other respected investors.
At Aquabyte, we admire interesting people with a unique background. We strongly encourage you to apply even if you don’t satisfy all the requirements, and we will get back to you as soon as possible!