Manufacturing Design Engineer

Ulysses is the ocean company. We design, manufacture, and operate autonomous vehicles for surface and subsea operations - taking on the most critical tasks across defense, commercial, and scientific missions. Our vertically integrated platform includes Mako, a modular AUV with 72-hour endurance and more onboard compute than any vehicle in its class; Leviathan, an autonomous surface vessel mothership; and Kraken, our automated launch-and-recovery system that closes the loop between surface and subsea with zero human intervention.

The ocean covers 71% of the Earth's surface and drives a $2.6 trillion global economy, yet it remains the least monitored domain on the planet. We're changing that — building autonomous systems that collapse the cost of ocean operations by orders of magnitude so that persistent coverage becomes the baseline, not the exception. We operate globally today across defense, ocean science, and commercial survey, working with partners including the U.S. Navy, the Government of Australia, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy.

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Ulysses has raised $48 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Booz Allen Ventures, Harpoon Ventures, Pebblebed, Lowercarbon Capital, and others. Our team is lean, hands-on, and fast — we prototype in the shop, test on the water, and ship. If you want to work at the frontier, there's no frontier bigger than the ocean.

We build our vehicles ourselves. Everything from the machined pressure housings to the final unit in its shipping case comes off our own line in San Francisco - and we're taking that line from small builds to rate.

We're looking for a Manufacturing Engineer to build the tooling and test infrastructure that makes that possible - and "tooling" undersells it. A good part of what you build will be machines in their own right: mechanisms that grip, seal, pressurise, spin and measure, with their own actuators, their own electronics, and their own software deciding pass or fail.

This is one of the few jobs where mechanical design, electrical work, actuation and code all land on the same bench in the same week, on something you get to watch running an hour after you finish it. If a Mako reaches the water and doesn't work, that's your problem - and the entire point of this role is that it doesn't happen.

• Build the machines that build the Mako

  • Design the fixtures, jigs, racks and handling equipment the line runs on, plus the one-off tools our technicians need and can't buy. Some of it is elegant aluminium and steel. Some of it has a servo in it, because a human doing that step by hand will eventually get it wrong.

  • Design workholding for our machine shop, and stand up assembly stations that are instrumented and connected - torque, mass and process data captured against a serial number in our MES rather than written on a traveller.

• Build the machines that prove it

  • A module end-of-line tester is a small robot. It has to receive the module, mate connectors, seal it, pull vacuum, drive the actuators under load, talk to firmware over the bus, read every sensor back, and return a verdict without a human interpreting a gauge. You'll design the mechanism, select the actuation, build the electrical interface, and write the software that sequences the whole thing. Then you'll do it again for the next module, and again at vehicle level.

  • At the extremes, that means pressure and leak verification to full operating depth, calibration rigs that characterise a sensor before anyone trusts it in the water, and dynos that give every actuator a performance curve of its own.

• Decide what good means

  • Set the limits. Author the PFMEAs and control plans for the stations you build, and define what happens when a unit fails.

  • Make the data usefu: first-pass yield by station, failure Paretos, drift caught before it becomes a yield problem - and feed what you learn back upstream, because design-for-manufacture and design-for-test problems surface on your line first.

  • Design how a finished vehicle is packaged and shipped: how it survives transit, and what a customer sees when the case opens.

• Automate it

  • Where the volume justifies it, take the repetition out - robotic cells, automated handling, semi-automated assembly. You'll make the call on where that's worth doing and then build it.

• You've built things that had to work - production tooling, test rigs, lab equipment, a competition car, a robot that survived contact with reality. Ideally something you can show us, or better, something you can describe failing and explain how you fixed it. We care more about what you've built than how long you've been building.

• You hold a Bachelor's degree (or are a talented dropout) in Mechanical, Manufacturing, or Mechatronics Engineering, or a related field.

• You're proficient in CAD (Onshape, NX, SolidWorks) and comfortable designing tooling to be machined in-house.

• You can write the software side of a test rig - Python or equivalent - and you're comfortable with sensors, instrumentation, and talking to hardware over a bus.

• You're fluent across mechanical and electrical domains and can hold a conversation with firmware engineers about what a test station actually needs to exercise.

• You have opinions about tolerance, fit, and measurement, and you can defend them with numbers.

• You work independently in a fast-moving environment and you'd rather build the fixture today than specify it for six weeks.

• Machine shop literacy - you know what's cheap to make and what isn't, and you design accordingly.

• Experience taking a hardware product from prototype build to production rate.

• MES or PLM implementation experience - we run custom a MES & PLM.

• Pressure vessel, hyperbaric, or high-consequence test experience, including the safety engineering around it.

• Experience with high-power electromechanical systems, battery packs, or BMS integration.

• CAM experience and comfort around CNC machines. Welding and fabrication skills.

• Robotic cell or automated assembly implementation.

• Exposure to defense manufacturing requirements - ITAR, DFARS, CMMC, or ISO9001-style quality systems.

• Time on the water. Ocean hardware teaches lessons nothing else does.

The job is on-site and in-person in San Francisco, CA.