The posting
Detroit, MI (in-person)
About Grounded
Grounded is a 25-person Detroit-based startup building modular electric platforms for specialty vehicles. We take cab chassis from OEMs like Ford and Harbinger and build configurable vehicle systems on top, serving mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more. Our customers include Colgate, Nokia, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and Portland PD. We've raised ~$5M in VC funding and are shipping vehicles in market today.
We also build our own software: a mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that lets customers monitor and control vehicle systems remotely. We design, fabricate, and assemble everything in-house at our facility in Corktown.
The Role
We're hiring a mechanical design engineer to help us solve the most important engineering challenge at Grounded: building a truly modular vehicle platform that enables mass customization at scale.
Today, our engineers do significant custom design work for each new customer and use case. That doesn't scale. We need to get to a system where the vehicle infrastructure (the box, the walls, the plumbing, the electrical routing, the mechanical attachment points) is universal, and customers choose from a library of modules that plug in. A salesperson should be able to configure a vehicle with a customer without an engineer touching it, unless there's a module that hasn't been designed yet.
This is a hard problem. We serve dozens of different verticals, each with different spatial, mechanical, plumbing, and electrical requirements. One week it's a mobile mammography unit, the next it's a police command center, the next it's a coffee truck. The person who cracks this defines how Grounded scales from a 25-person shop to a 250-person company.
At the same time, we're actively shipping vehicles to customers. We have a production backlog and can't pause the business to go heads-down on R&D for six months. So you'd be balancing both: engineering and delivering current customer vehicles while also carving out time to iterate toward the modular system.
What you'd actually do
- Own mechanical design for customer vehicles and for the modular platform itself, from whiteboard to CAD to the shop floor
- Design in Siemens NX complex assemblies with hundreds to thousands of components per vehicle
- Work daily with our technician team who build everything in-house: creating work instructions, answering questions, problem-solving on the floor when designs meet reality
- Think at the systems level across mechanical, plumbing, and electrical integration (you won't do electrical design, but you need to understand how it all comes together)
- Iterate fast! We often start fabrication before design is fully complete, working front-to-back on vehicles to maintain pace
- Contribute to building a module library with standardized attachment points, BOMs, and assembly instructions that can be mixed and matched across verticals
- Collaborate with software engineers on automating parts of the design and manufacturing workflow, including exploring parametric design, dynamic BOM generation, automated work instructions, etc.
What we're looking for
- 7+ years of mechanical design experience; you've designed physical products, not just components, and taken them from concept through production
- Strong CAD skills (NX preferred, but SolidWorks, CATIA, etc with willingness to learn NX works)
- Experience designing for manufacturability: welded structures, sheet metal, tubed aluminum, fastening systems. You think about how things get built, not just how they look in CAD
- Comfortable on a shop floor. You don't need to run the CNC yourself, but you need to be next to the technicians, watching your designs get built, and iterating in real time
- Systems-level thinker: not someone who's spent their career on one small component at a big company. You can hold the whole vehicle in your head; as well as both current builds and future modularity
- Background in automotive, commercial vehicles, EV, industrial equipment, or similar: something where you've dealt with real-world loads, vibration, water systems, and integration complexity
- Experience at a smaller company or startup is a strong plus. We need someone who thrives with ambiguity, moves fast, and doesn't need layers of process to be productive
Nice-to-haves
- Experience designing modular, configurable, or platform-based product architectures
- Familiarity with automation tools: scripting, parametric design, programmatic CAD generation
- Experience with composites, CNC routing, or additive manufacturing
Compensation
Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in Grounded + comprehensive health insurance
Why this role is different
At a big company, you'd own one subsystem on one product. Here, you'll design a kitchen module on Monday, a dental chair mount on Wednesday, and a police command center layout on Friday; and then step back and figure out how to make all of those the same configurable system. It's creative, it's technical, and the variety is unlike anything you'll find at a traditional OEM or Tier 1. You'll also work directly with the leadership team daily in a team where every engineer has real ownership and impact.
