Mechanical Design Engineer

Mission

Neko is redefining what prevention means, from treating illness when it arrives, to sustaining health before it's ever at risk. Our mission: make data-driven, preventative care accessible to more people, before symptoms appear.

In a single, non-invasive visit under an hour, proprietary technology and direct clinical care combine to deliver personalised, actionable insights. It's a team that thinks in 10x, not 10%. Every role here plays a part in building a world where prevention is the norm, and where your work genuinely helps people live longer, healthier lives.

We're looking for a Mechanical Design Engineer to close the gap between development and production. A design that's finished on screen isn't yet a design that's ready to be made.

About the role

The work is finding practical ways to test and evaluate that readiness while changes are still easy, fast and cheap to make, and before a design is locked behind a controlled change process: that the design does what it's meant to do, and that it can be assembled and produced at scale. The output is a corrected design, not a report. You either make the change yourself or work it through with the designer who owns it. It runs the other way too. When production finds something after release, you turn that feedback into a corrected design quickly.

Mechanical design is five engineers today and you'd be the sixth. We work in small teams on hardware that moves quickly between development and production, so priorities shift and what a product needs changes with it. The responsibilities below describe where the focus sits today, and the boundary moves. You'll be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity and flexibility about the work in front of you.

What you'll do

Design readiness before release

• Decide what needs proving before a design is released, and how to prove it quickly. Judging which risks are worth testing early is the core of the role

• Design and build the prototypes and test setups that answer the question at hand: function, dimensional behaviour, robustness in use and how the subsystems come together

• Assess manufacturability and assemblability, both directly and by drawing on input from manufacturing

• Work hands-on with the other design engineers, devising the builds, measurements and trials that shorten the loop between a design question and an answer

• Make full use of our in-house prototyping — workshop, machine shop and printers — alongside sourcing and our manufacturers to get prototype parts in early, and shape how we pull development prototypes together across both routes

• Develop how we assess readiness, so each product benefits from what the last one taught us

Design feedback from production

• Work alongside production engineering on issues found in production, and own what the fix requires on the design side

• Correct CAD and drawings and take them through release quickly, so production isn't held up waiting on a design fix

• Work within design control, including the medical device change process where it applies, and find ways to turn feedback around quickly inside that constraint

Product design ownership

Principal product ownership is what the other mechanical design engineers do today, and your main scope is to work alongside them and close the manufacturing readiness gap. Full ownership of a product's mechanical design is open to you where it fits: a smaller product, bandwidth alongside your main scope, or a shift in priorities that means a product needs an owner.

What you bring

• Mechanical design and CAD depth, proven on products you've taken from design into production

• Hands-on build and rapid prototyping experience

• Time spent on a production floor, close to how products are built and assembled

• Design for manufacturing and design for assembly, applied in practice

• Devising and running practical tests, and judging what's worth testing and when

• Fluent in drawings, tolerancing and tolerance stack-up

• Comfortable working inside a controlled release and engineering change process

• Self-driven. The role largely sets its own agenda: working out where the risk sits and going after it without being directed

• Works well with manufacturing and sourcing, and can take critical feedback on a design and act on it

Bonus points

• Experience of regulated products, medical devices or another regulated industry

• Familiarity with ISO 13485 or EU MDR design control

Why join this team

You set the agenda. You decide what needs proving before a design goes out, then build the prototypes and setups and prove it. What comes out is a released drawing production can build and an honest read on how mature and feasible the design really is — and that read is what gives everyone else the confidence to release.

You sit alongside the other design engineers and bring insight back to them early, while a design is still conceptual and there's still time to change it. Testing assumptions quickly is where you shape what a device becomes. You don't only find things either: you decide how we find them, how we fix them, and you verify the fixes yourself.

The loop is short. Products move between development and production quickly here, so you follow a design from the first prototypes into production and see your own work land. You work directly with manufacturing on whatever is giving them trouble, so your changes show up fast in how well and how quickly we can build. Manufacturing, procurement, electronics, firmware, optics and verification all sit in the same hardware organisation, so the people whose constraints you're designing around are a conversation away.

And all of it ends up in clinics, in front of real people getting answers they wouldn't otherwise have.