Timebeat
MCAD / Design engineer
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Job Title
You will own the physical product. Enclosures, chassis, brackets, panels, thermal design, mounting, and every drawing that goes to a contract manufacturer.
Junior to mid level, senior level scope, because we are a small team. In your first year you will take a product enclosure from a sketch to a manufactured part in a customer's rack, and you will be the person whose name is on the drawing pack.
About Timebeat
We build precision time synchronisation hardware: PCIe cards, rack appliances and portable units that give stock exchanges, telecoms operators, broadcasters, defence primes and government programmes a clock they can prove is correct. Our hardware is open, and so is our mechanical design.
Why This Role is Worth Having
Thermal design is product performance.
In a lot of companies the mechanical engineer is handed a finished board and told to put a box around it. Not here, and for a specific technical reason. Our accuracy comes from oscillators, and an oscillator is a device whose entire job is to not move. The thing most likely to move it is a change in temperature. Airflow, thermal mass, where the hot silicon sits relative to the oscillator, how the enclosure behaves when a rack neighbour spins its fans up. Those are your decisions, and they show up directly in how well the product holds time. Mechanical design here is part of the specification.
You will see it built.
Small company, real budget for prototypes, contract manufacturers we talk to directly, no queue for someone else's model shop. You will hold the part you drew, find what is wrong with it, and issue the next revision inside weeks rather than quarters.
Your work is published.
Our designs are open. Engineers across the Open Compute Project community read them. That is a portfolio no proprietary role can give you.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
We are hiring for trajectory.
You do not need to have done all of this before. You need to have done some of it properly, and to be the sort of person who reads the manufacturing standard rather than guessing. Whoever owns mechanical design now leads it as the team grows.
What You Will Do
- Design enclosures and chassis for rack mounted appliances, portable units and PCIe card assemblies.
- Produce the full manufacturing pack: 3D models, 2D drawings, tolerances, finishes, fasteners, brackets, panels, cutouts, labelling and revision control.
- Own sheet metal and machined part design for low to medium volume production, and understand what your chosen process actually costs.
- Own thermal design: airflow paths, heatsinking, fan and vent selection, thermal isolation of oscillators, and the trade between cooling and acoustic noise in a customer's rack.
- Sit with the electronics engineers so the board outline and the enclosure are designed together rather than thrown over the wall. You will be in layout reviews arguing about connector positions, and that is the point.
- Own the mechanical BOM and the suppliers behind it, and work with our manufacturers on DFM feedback, first article inspection and fixtures.
What We Are Looking For
Essential
- A mechanical engineering degree or equivalent demonstrated experience, plus one to five years of design work. We are open on the exact number.
- Genuine competence in a 3D MCAD package. SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Onshape, Inventor or Creo. If you learned on one, you can learn ours.
- Sheet metal and machined part design, and how the process constrains the geometry.
- A drawing another person can manufacture from without ringing you up. Tolerancing, datums, fits, surface finish.
- Basic thermal reasoning: conduction, convection, where the heat goes and why. And hands on: you would rather build a test piece than argue about a model for a week.
- Able to work in our London office. This is hardware, so bench time is not optional.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Desirable
- Electronics enclosure design, and comfort reading a PCB layout.
- Thermal or structural simulation, at any level of sophistication.
- Rack mounted equipment, data centre or telecoms hardware.
- EMC aware mechanical design: shielding, gasketing, bonding and aperture control.
- Environmental qualification: shock, vibration, thermal cycling, IP ratings.
- Rendering, technical illustration, or PDM and PLM discipline. An interest in precision timing, oscillators or GNSS. Eligibility for UK security clearance.
You will not tick all of this list. Nobody does. Apply anyway.
What We Offer
- Competitive salary depending on experience.
- Prototype and print budget, and a bench of your own.
- Ownership of the physical product from sketch to production part.
- Direct access to the founders and a genuine say in what we build.
How to Apply
What matters more than the CV: you finish things, you are honest about what you do not know, and you check your work, because the faults that reach a customer are the ones nobody measured.
Send a CV and two or three images of something you designed and had manufactured, with a sentence on what you would do differently now, to recruit@timebeat.app. Student, personal and open source projects are welcome. We would rather see one part you understand completely than a portfolio of renders.
Click apply on LinkedIn.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location