Mechanical Engineer

Description

About AIRoA

The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is launching a groundbreaking initiative: collecting one million hours of humanoid robot operation data with hundreds of robots, and leveraging it to train the world’s most powerful Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

What makes AIRoA unique is not only the unprecedented scale of real-world data and humanoid platforms, but also our commitment to making everything open and accessible. We are building a shared “robot data ecosystem” where datasets, trained models, and benchmarks are available to everyone. Researchers around the world will be able to evaluate their models on standardized humanoid robots through our open evaluation platform.

 

Job Description

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Developing semi-/full-humanoid robots used in projects within AIRoA
• Developing teleoperation systems, including leader–follower systems
• Developing robotic hands
• Building verification/validation environments used in projects and developing jigs/fixtures

 

Requirements

Required Qualifications

Career

• Master’s degree or higher in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years of professional experience in mechanical design (product design, mechanism design, or enclosure/housing design)

 

Mechanical Design

• Extensive experience in designing mechanical products, mechanical assemblies, tools, and jigs/fixtures
• Hands-on experience with material selection, tolerance specification, and tolerance stack-up analysis as needed
• Experience creating and revising 2D drawings (assembly drawings and part drawings)
• Hands-on experience designing assemblies using 3D CAD software such as SolidWorks, CATIA, OnShape, or Creo

 

Robotics System Integration

• Mechanical design experience for robots (e.g., humanoids, dual-arm robots) or mechatronics products of equivalent complexity
• Experience collaborating with electrical and software teams to integrate mechanical systems including sensors and actuation
• Proven experience making design decisions considering motion, loads, and durability (e.g., range of motion, interference, stiffness, weight, heat, vibration) and achieving validation through prototyping and testing

 

Manufacturing and Quality

• Hands-on experience from prototyping through verification and validation
• End-to-end experience preventing recurrence through design changes based on test results/failure analysis
• Practical experience designing with DFx (e.g., Design for Manufacturability, Assembly, Inspection)
• Experience ensuring post-assembly function and performance through tolerance design (tolerance specification and tolerance stack-up analysis as needed)

 

Preferred Qualifications

Domain Expertise 

• Experience selecting and integrating actuators (e.g., brushless DC motors, high-precision gearboxes) and sensors (e.g., 6-axis force/torque sensors, IMUs, tactile sensors)
• Knowledge of robot kinematics and dynamics (forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, Jacobians) and experience applying them in practice
• Hands-on experience with FEA (linear/nonlinear structural analysis, vibration analysis, thermal analysis) and analytical calculations
• Experience with FEA tools such as ANSYS or Abaqus, and motion simulation tools such as Adams or Gazebo

 

Robotics Experience

• Direct experience with bipedal robot dynamics and control
• Experience with production and scaling of humanoid robots or mechanical systems of equivalent complexity
• Experience designing and controlling hydraulic or pneumatic actuation systems

 

Regulations and Safety

• Knowledge of product safety, regulatory, and compliance standards (e.g., ISO 13482)

 

Manufacturing and Project Management

• Experience working in global manufacturing environments (supplier selection, mold design, production ramp-up, scaling, etc.)
• Experience delivering turnkey manufacturing solutions
• Knowledge of lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement tools
• Experience handling mass-production issues and managing design-change processes (e.g., ECR/ECO)

 

Leadership and Other

• Leadership experience mentoring junior engineers and influencing stakeholders
• Ability to lead cross-disciplinary engineering teams
• Experience in automotive, consumer electronics, or similarly complex hardware systems

 

Benefits

There are currently no comparable projects in the world that collect data and develop foundation models on such a large scale. As mentioned above, this is one of Japan’s leading national projects, supported by a substantial investment of 20.5 billion yen from NEDO.

This position will play a crucial role in determining the success of the project. You will have broad discretion and responsibility, and we are confident that, if successful, you will gain both a great sense of achievement and the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to society.

Furthermore, we strongly encourage engineers to actively build their careers through this project—for example, by publishing research papers and engaging in academic activities.