Charge Robotics is a YC-backed startup building robots that build large-scale solar farms. Demand for new solar projects is booming (1/5th of all the solar that exists in the US was installed last year!), but today’s construction companies can’t keep up due to limited labor resources.
We thought this was insane, so we started working on robots to directly address this bottleneck and speed up the world’s transition to renewables.
We’re a small, fast moving company which means constant opportunity for learning and growth. You’ll have a large impact on the direction of our company and our product, which will be reflected in significant equity compensation. And you get to play with 🤖 giant robots 🤖.
If you are excited to work on interesting technical problems with direct climate impact, you’re going to fit right in.
As a mechanical engineer at Charge Robotics, you’ll own a significant chunk of the ground-up development for a new robotic system that assembles solar farms. You'll work with very large industrial hardware, become an armchair expert in solar construction, and directly help accelerate the global transition to renewable energy.
What you’ll be working on
- Designing, building, testing, and iterating on mechanical systems for solar assembly
- Tracking, investigating, and resolving hardware issues with robots
- Communicating with other engineers to integrate new designs
- Playing with some very large mechanisms
You
- Are experienced with industry-standard CAD software (we use Onshape)
- Know how to fabricate your parts but also know when to send drawings out to a shop
- Enjoy working in a fast-paced startup environment
- Have excellent written communication skills
- Are based in or can relocate to the SF bay area
- Gain satisfaction from personally playing a part in mitigating climate change
- Are excited to see your work deployed onto actual solar farms!
It’d also be nice if you
- Have experience working with industrial robot arms, end effectors, and automation systems
- Have a 4-year degree in mechanical engineering or a related field
Our first robot is an autonomous 25,000 pound piece of construction equipment called a telehandler. Getting our prototype up and running involved reverse-engineering messages on a CAN bus, bolting motors onto the steering column and brakes, intercepting the throttle and joystick with our own microcontrollers, and writing software to glue the whole thing together. Our robot's backend is a mix of Python and C++, with worker processes communicating with each other over ZeroMQ. Our web frontend is in React.