What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Solutions Engineer position at Instrumental Inc.?
Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.
As a Senior Solutions Engineer, you'll combine mechanical design, electronics manufacturing expertise, and customer collaboration to create custom hardware and software solutions that become part of real production lines. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving difficult engineering problems, has worked across many different consumer electronics products, and is excited to see their designs deployed in the field.
If you've ever wanted to expand your impact beyond designing a single product, this role offers the opportunity to work across dozens of manufacturing environments while partnering directly with customers to solve some of the industry's toughest production challenges.
What You'll Do
Unlike most mechanical engineering roles, you won't spend years iterating on a single product.
Instead, you'll work across a wide variety of customer applications—from AI infrastructure and networking equipment to consumer electronics and defense. Every project presents a new engineering challenge, a new manufacturing environment, and a new opportunity to build something that has immediate impact.
You'll own technical solutions from concept through deployment while working alongside experienced engineers who enjoy solving difficult problems and moving quickly.
We're Looking For Someone Who Has
We're especially excited to talk with engineers who have experience in:
You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!
The following is a representative annual overall total compensation range for this position within the Bay Area: $204,000-$240,000. In addition, job level & salary opportunity is evaluated through our interview process – we review experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.
Instrumental is very proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits including: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Maternity/Paternity Leave.
At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.
As a Senior Solutions Engineer, you'll combine mechanical design, electronics manufacturing expertise, and customer collaboration to create custom hardware and software solutions that become part of real production lines. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving difficult engineering problems, has worked across many different consumer electronics products, and is excited to see their designs deployed in the field.
If you've ever wanted to expand your impact beyond designing a single product, this role offers the opportunity to work across dozens of manufacturing environments while partnering directly with customers to solve some of the industry's toughest production challenges.
What You'll Do
- Partner directly with customer engineering, manufacturing, and operations teams to understand their production process, product requirements, quality goals, and manufacturing constraints.
- Learn how customer manufacturing systems generate data—including images, test results, BOMs, and production records—and leverage these inputs to design solutions that improve visibility, identify issues, and accelerate manufacturing decisions.
- Translate customer challenges into complete manufacturing solutions by leveraging your expertise in electronics manufacturing, fixture design, and production engineering.
- Design end-to-end inspection solutions, determining where Instrumental stations should be deployed within a production line to maximize coverage, throughput, and business impact.
- Define the technical solution for each deployment, including station placement, imaging strategy, mechanical fixtures, nests, optics, lighting, and supporting production hardware.
- Balance engineering tradeoffs such as cycle time, ergonomics, manufacturability, cost, line constraints, and inspection coverage to deliver practical, scalable solutions.
- Create and review mechanical designs for custom fixtures, nests, and production hardware that integrate seamlessly into customer manufacturing lines.
- Partner closely with Sales, Product, Hardware, Software, and Customer Success teams to scope projects and ensure successful customer deployments.
- Serve as the technical expert throughout the customer engagement, building trusted relationships with engineering teams and helping solve complex manufacturing problems.
Unlike most mechanical engineering roles, you won't spend years iterating on a single product.
Instead, you'll work across a wide variety of customer applications—from AI infrastructure and networking equipment to consumer electronics and defense. Every project presents a new engineering challenge, a new manufacturing environment, and a new opportunity to build something that has immediate impact.
You'll own technical solutions from concept through deployment while working alongside experienced engineers who enjoy solving difficult problems and moving quickly.
We're Looking For Someone Who Has
- 10 years of experience in mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, product design, automation, test equipment, or related engineering disciplines.
- Experience working on high-volume electronics manufacturing floors, with a strong understanding of production workflows, manufacturing processes, line constraints, and the realities of scaling from NPI to mass production.
- Strong CAD experience (SolidWorks, Creo, NX, or similar).
- Strong understanding of manufacturing processes, DFM, tolerance analysis, and mechanical design best practices.
- Excellent communication skills and a genuine interest in working directly with customers.
- A builder's mindset—you enjoy solving ambiguous problems, taking ownership, and moving quickly.
- Startup experience or a history of driving initiatives independently is a plus.
- Ability to travel occasionally to customer sites.
We're especially excited to talk with engineers who have experience in:
- High volume consumer electronics
- Robotics or automation
- AI server or networking hardware
- Optical systems or machine vision
You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!
The following is a representative annual overall total compensation range for this position within the Bay Area: $204,000-$240,000. In addition, job level & salary opportunity is evaluated through our interview process – we review experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.
Instrumental is very proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits including: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Maternity/Paternity Leave.
At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.
Salary : $204,000 - $240,000