Mechanical Engineer
About the role
About Us
We're Queue, the world's first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy. We go from sealed wholesale bottles to filled, verified prescription vials with zero human involvement.
We built Queue because no one should ever have to wait in line for the medicines they need. One in three US pharmacies has shut down. Pharmacists are overworked to a breaking point. And patients are paying the price. Queue fixes that. Pharmacists get to practice pharmacy again — counseling patients, catching interactions, doing the work only they can do. And patients get their prescriptions in 60 seconds or less, any time, anywhere.
We’re backed by over $18 million from Alleycorp, Riot Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, House Capital, and others who believe the pharmacy system is broken and that robotics can fix it. Queue was founded by Nick Desai (6x founder, previously CEO of Heal) and Joshua Liu (previously Tesla, Waymo, and Zipline).
About the Role
As a Mechanical Engineer, you’ll design, build, and test the mechanisms inside our robotic pharmacy. This is a hands-on role. You’ll take parts and subassemblies from a sketch and a hand calculation to hardware running on the bench, then break it, learn from it, and build the next one.
We aren’t looking for years on a resume. We’re looking for people who build things, and who can explain from first principles why their design works. If you can draw the free-body diagram, estimate the answer before you open the simulation, and then go make the part yourself, we want to meet you.
You’ll work side by side with senior engineers who own the system architecture. You’ll own real hardware early, and your scope will grow as fast as your judgment does.
What makes this role extraordinary
Your hardware will handle real medication for real patients. Few early-career roles let you design a mechanism, build it with your own hands, watch it fail, fix it, and see it go into a product headed for nationwide deployment.
What You’ll Do
Build and Iterate:
- Design, fabricate, and assemble prototype mechanisms, fixtures, and test rigs yourself
- Use the fastest method that answers the question: 3D printing, laser cutting, manual and CNC machining, or hand tools
- Assemble, debug, and rework hardware on the bench alongside our technicians
- Run short loops: build something, learn from it, and improve it in days, not months
Engineering Judgment from First Principles:
- Start every design with a sketch, a free-body diagram, and a hand calculation before CAD or simulation
- Size springs, motors, bearings, shafts, and fasteners from loads, energy, and duty cycle
- Choose materials and finishes for stated reasons: strength, stiffness, wear, fatigue, and cost
- Run tolerance stack-ups on the interfaces that matter, and know which ones those are
- State your assumptions, decide what is good enough, and check your prediction against the hardware
Test and Learn:
- Write simple test plans, instrument your builds, and collect data you trust
- Compare results to your calculations and explain the gap
- Find the root cause when something breaks, not just the patch
- Record what you learned so the next engineer can build on it
Grow into Production Design:
- Create parts in CAD and release drawings a shop can build from
- Learn design for manufacturing (DFM) by working with senior engineers and our suppliers on machined, molded, and sheet metal parts
- Work with electrical and software engineers to integrate motors, sensors, and harnesses
- Help carry designs from prototype toward systems that run reliably 24/7 in a pharmacy
Required Qualifications and Experiences
We don’t care about your degrees. We care about what you can show us! Send us your resume and portfolio, with photos and video of things you built, including the ones that failed and what you changed.
- Builder first: A portfolio of hardware you designed and physically made. Project teams, internships, research, and personal projects all count
- 0–3 years of hands-on mechanical or mechatronic engineering experience, in industry or out of it
- First-principles fundamentals: Working command of statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, and machine design. You can go from a sketch to a free-body diagram to a number, and defend the number
- Engineering judgment: You can explain why you chose a material, a mechanism, or a tolerance, and what you traded away to get it
- Hands-on fabrication: Comfortable in a shop with 3D printers, hand tools, and basic machining. You debug with a caliper and a multimeter, not just a screen
- CAD proficiency: Solid part and assembly modeling in a 3D CAD platform (OnShape, SolidWorks, Creo), and drawings clear enough to build from
- Ownership: You finish what you start, say what you don’t know, and learn fast from feedback
Nice to Have:
- Mechanisms with moving parts: linkages, cams, gear trains, linear stages, grippers, dispensers
- Mechatronics basics: motors, sensors, and a microcontroller you wired and programmed yourself
- Tolerance analysis and GD&T on parts that had to fit and function
- Exposure to manufacturing methods such as machining, injection molding, sheet metal, or casting
- Python or MATLAB for test data and quick calculations
- Simulation (FEA) used to check a hand calculation, not replace it
How We Hire
- Recruiter Screen (30 min)
- Hiring Manager Interview (60 min): walk us through something you built
- Embedded Technical Interview (60 min): work a design problem from first principles
- Technical presentation to the team (60 min)
- Leadership Interview (30 min)
What We Offer
- Early-stage equity in automated pharmacy dispensing at scale
- Direct impact: your hardware dispenses medication to real patients
- Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust
- Hard problems: precision mechanisms, high-reliability hardware, regulatory compliance, and real-time hardware integration
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Meaningful early-stage equity
- Health, 401(k), unlimited PTO
Why Join Us Now?
Impact & Growth
- Direct Patient Impact: Your hardware will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients
- Market Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology
- Technical Innovation: Work on novel problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and healthcare
- Career Acceleration: Real ownership early, with scope that grows as the company scales
Team and Culture
- World-Class Team: Learn alongside exceptional engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare experts
- Direct Access: Work directly with the co-founders, with real autonomy and genuine influence over decisions
- Innovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation
- Mission-Driven: Team united around the goal of transforming healthcare through technology
Our Values
- Servant Leadership: Make those around you better. We serve our teams the way Queue serves communities: 4,000 pharmacies close each year and deserts are spreading - we’re here to reverse that.
- Do the Hard Things: Healthcare, hardware, and company-building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve.
- Own Your Work: Be accountable; take pride in what you ship. Queue lives and dies by what you do - own it fully.
- Default is Now: There’s never a better time than today. Default to action: what can we prove, learn, or simplify right now?
