Lead Mechanical Engineer

Senior Mechanical Engineering Lead | Edison, New Jersey. Onsite.

Our client is a start-up based in Edison, NJ is building a complex electromechanical surgical system from the ground up, and needs an engineer's engineer to lead the mechanical work.

This is not a role where you are handed a detailed spec and asked to execute it. You will take a rendering, a sketch or a problem statement from the CEO and turn it into a working prototype quickly, with your own hands and alongside a small team of engineers. Then you will own the path from that prototype to a production-grade unit that can be manufactured at scale.

What you will do

• Take concepts, mockups and loose constraints and produce prototypes fast, built to survive trade shows and surgeon visits, not just the bench.
• Design precision mechanisms and multi-axis actuation where accuracy, stiffness, calibration and safety are the product itself, not an afterthought.
• Look critically at everything you are given. If the right answer is to throw it away and do it better, make that call and do it.
• Lead junior engineers by example: in CAD, in the lab and at the machine with them, getting the most out of each of them and hiring more as the team grows.
• Work across software, controls, quality and regulatory so that what you build can be verified, documented and submitted with confidence.
• Sit at the table on executive-level decisions about the product and how it gets built.

Who this suits

• You have led mechanical engineers in industry while staying hands on. Supervising student projects does not count here.
• You have built highly custom devices from a problem statement and vague constraints, in a small company or startup, and they were accurate, beautiful and mechanically sound. If your instinct is to assemble off-the-shelf parts and call it done, this is not the role.
• You understand mechanisms, kinematics and actuation deeply enough to reason through a design problem on a whiteboard rather than exporting a CAD model and finding a tool to do it for you.
• You have made transformational change at least once: looked at an existing system, decided it was wrong, started from scratch and shipped something better.
• You have taken a device through industrialisation and launch, or been central to it, and you want to lead that here rather than learn it.
• You have grit, you want to beat the competition, and you put the company's product ahead of your own side projects.
• Your background might be surgical or medical devices, humanoid or field robotics, prosthetics, early-stage aerospace or space hardware, motorsport, scientific instrumentation or animatronics. Medical device experience helps. A fast-cycle, build-it-yourself track record matters more.

Practicalities

• Onsite in Edison, NJ. You will be in the lab with the hardware most days, so a commute you can sustain matters.
• Compensation is set for the person, not a band. We are open to strong engineers from outside medical devices.

Cruxx is the retained search partner on this hire. Direct applications only.