We are building an AI-native manufacturing marketplace, transforming how the best companies get custom parts manufactured in the U.S. There aren’t many early stage companies where you’ll get work with industry titans like Apple, Anduril and NASA, solving their critical production challenges, but you will at Vendra. We accelerate lead times, de-risk supply chains, and on-shore production, especially across aerospace, defense, and other critical industries.

Our vision is to become the only resource a hardware company ever turns to when they need hardware manufactured. We’re backed by Y Combinator and top investors, and we’re building a team to ship fast and solve hard problems as we continue to scale fast.

Vendra is registered under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and supports U.S. government and defense programs. This role is restricted to U.S. Persons (22 CFR §120.62) located in the United States.

We’re a fast growing manufacturing startup (30%+ MoM growth) working with top aerospace and defense teams, and we’re hiring a mechanical engineer to help scale how complex parts go from CAD to reality.

This is a highly technical, hands-on role. In a normal day, you’ll

• Read and interpret 2D drawings and CAD
• Identify manufacturing risks before parts ever get to a supplier
• Match parts to the right supplier and process using tons of real data
• Work directly with customer and manufacturers to resolve issues
• Run supplier operations from RFQ to quote to production management to delivery
• Help turn human engineering judgment (aka all of the above) into reliable, automated software systems

What you’ll work on

You’ll operate across engineering, operations, and product, and help build out internal processes and tools from scratch. This isn’t a typical CAD-only mechanical design role. You’ll wear hardware engineering, software engineering, and supply chain hats as needed.

Core Responsibilities

• Evaluate parts for manufacturability
  • Read and interpret 2D drawings and 3D CAD to understand customer requirements (GD&T, material, finish, setup, etc.)
  • Flag manufacturing risks early (need to elaborate more here)
• Supplier matching and qualification
  • Match customer requirements to suppliers in the Vendra network based on capabilities, real-time capacity, and past experience
  • Help qualify new suppliers and processes (what they can build well, not just what they claim)
  • Build structure around capturing supplier experience (past performance, on-time-delivery, etc.) and feed it into our matching systems
• System and automation
  • Help design internal tools for supplier matching, drawing/CAD analysis, and automating RFQ and production workflows
  • We capture a ton of valuable data on suppliers - technical details of the parts they win, quality metrics, response times and feedback, etc. - all of which needs to feed into the core RFQ analysis and matching system we’re building

What we’re looking for

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (or equivalent practical experience)
• Strong experience with manufacturing, specifically in
  • CNC machining (metals, plastics, composites)
  • Additive manufacturing (FDM, SLA, SLS, DMLS, or similar)
• Proven ability to
  • Read and understand complex 2D drawings (GD&T, tolerances, notes)
  • Analyze CAD models to understand manufacturing processes and identify manufacturing issues quickly and accurately
• Hands on experience taking parts from design → prototype → production
• Experience with Python or other software tools to analyze data and automate parts of your workflow (parsing 2D drawings, analyzing supplier performance, building internal tools)
• Experience with using AI effectively for research, data analysis, and problem solving

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with supplier qualification and capability assessments
• Experience in high-mix manufacturing (at both low and high volume)
• Experience building or working with software tooling (especially process automation)
• Experience in fast-moving startups without day-to-day structure

You’ll thrive in this role if you’re a hands-on engineer who’s naturally curious about how things are made. If you look at a part and immediately think about fixturing, tolerances, or failure modes, you’re a good fit.

Comfort with code is also important. You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you should be able to use tools like Cursor to write simple Python scripts to analyze data and automate parts of your work. We expect engineers on this team to constantly be thinking about ways of turning the manual sourcing and manufacturing process into smart internal tools and workflows over time.

Frontend: React, TypeScript. Backend: Node.js, Python. ML and Agents: OpenAI, Claude, fine tuned models, custom LLM orchestration. Infra: AWS, Postgres, Redis, S3, Vercel, Docker. Data: Real time quote intelligence, supplier availability, historical manufacturing performance.