About Vendra

We are building an AI-native manufacturing marketplace, transforming how the best companies get custom parts manufactured in the U.S. There aren’t many early stage companies where you’ll get work with industry titans like Apple, Anduril and NASA, solving their critical production challenges, but you will do this at Vendra. We accelerate lead times, de-risk supply chains, and on-shore production, especially across aerospace, defense, and other critical industries.

About The Role

We’re growing fast (30%+ MoM) and working with top aerospace and defense teams. We’re hiring a mechanical engineer to help scale how complex parts go from CAD to reality.

This is a highly technical, hands-on role. In a normal day, you’ll

Read and interpret 2D drawings and CAD
Identify manufacturing risks before parts ever get to a supplier
Match parts to the right supplier and process using tons of real data
Work directly with customer and manufacturers to resolve issues
Run supplier operations from RFQ to quote to production management to delivery
Help turn human engineering judgment (aka all of the above) into reliable, automated software systems

What you'll work on

You’ll operate across engineering, operations, and product, and help build out internal processes and tools from scratch. This isn’t a typical CAD-only mechanical design role. You’ll wear hardware engineering, software engineering, and supply chain hats as needed.

Core Responsibilities

Evaluate parts for manufacturability
Read and interpret 2D drawings and 3D CAD to understand customer requirements (GD&T, material, finish, setup, etc.)
Flag manufacturing risks early (need to elaborate more here)
Supplier matching and qualification
Match customer requirements to suppliers in the Vendra network based on capabilities, real-time capacity, and past experience
Help qualify new suppliers and processes (what they can build well, not just what they claim)
Build structure around capturing supplier experience (past performance, on-time-delivery, etc.) and feed it into our matching systems
System and automation
Help design internal tools for supplier matching, drawing/CAD analysis, and automating RFQ and production workflows
We capture a ton of valuable data on suppliers - technical details of the parts they win, quality metrics, response times and feedback, etc. - all of which needs to feed into the core RFQ analysis and matching system we’re building

What we're looking for

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (or equivalent practical experience)
Strong experience with manufacturing, specifically in
CNC machining (metals, plastics, composites)
Additive manufacturing (FDM, SLA, SLS, DMLS, or similar)
Proven ability to
Read and understand complex 2D drawings (GD&T, tolerances, notes)
Analyze CAD models to understand manufacturing processes and identify manufacturing issues quickly and accurately
Hands on experience taking parts from design → prototype → production
Experience with Python or other software tools to analyze data and automate parts of your workflow (parsing 2D drawings, analyzing supplier performance, building internal tools)
Experience with using AI effectively for research, data analysis, and problem solving

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with supplier qualification and capability assessments
Experience in high-mix manufacturing (at both low and high volume)
Experience building or working with software tooling (especially process automation)
Experience in fast-moving startups without day-to-day structure

You’ll thrive in this role if you’re a hands-on engineer who’s naturally curious about how things are made. If you look at a part and immediately think about fixturing, tolerances, or failure modes, you’re a good fit.

Comfort with code is also important. You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you should be able to use tools like Cursor to write simple Python scripts to analyze data and automate parts of your work. We expect engineers on this team to constantly be thinking about ways of turning the manual sourcing and manufacturing process into smart internal tools and workflows over time.

Vendra (YC S24)

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