LAYRR
Mechanical Development Engineer
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Position: Mechanical Development Engineer
Location: Oxford area, UK
Reports to: CTO
Remuneration: T2 - Engineering (£49,600-£57,000 pa)
About LAYRR
LAYRR is a deep-tech startup with a proprietary Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD)-on-Powder Platform that transforms standard, commodity powders into high-performance functional materials with broad application potential. By engineering the surface of materials at an atomic level, we maximise the performance of next-generation hardware.
The Role: Your Mission
You will bring dedicated mechanical design and build to our engineering team. You take the mechanical design and development of new hardware from an agreed concept through to a rig that does the same thing every time: the scaling up of powder handling and inert transfer systems that unlock our higher-value, sensitive-material markets. The job is finished when the kit runs reliably, not when the drawing is signed off.
This is a new role as we grow the engineering team. You will work alongside our Systems Engineer both reporting to the CTO. You bring the dedicated mechanical design and build depth that the next generation of hardware needs, owning the mechanical design and delivery of new kit.
You are hands-on, methodical and pragmatic, and you take your satisfaction from hardware that works.
What You Will Own
- Detailed mechanical design: Turn agreed system concepts and architecture into detailed, buildable, tolerance-controlled mechanical designs, including powder handling, inert transfer and load-locking.
- Build and commissioning: Take mechanical hardware from drawing to built, commissioned and running, and see it through until it is repeatable and reliable.
- Mechanical reliability: When the hardware throws up a recurring mechanical problem, design the fix. You improve reliability through better mechanical design, working with the Systems Engineer, who owns operation and first-line troubleshooting.
- Design for manufacture: Make hardware that can actually be built, maintained and replicated, working with the systems, process and controls engineers.
Core Competencies & Proven Capabilities
What you can actually do matters far more to us than the letters after your name. Whether learned in industry or academia, you must demonstrate:
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- Hardware you finished: A track record of taking mechanical systems from design through build and commissioning, and owning them until they ran reliably. Systems that got made and worked, not architectures that stayed on the whiteboard. This is the heart of the role.
- Mechanical design mastery: Strong CAD inc. FEA, CFD and/or Fluid Dynamics, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), and design for manufacture, ideally with SolidWorks. You design real, buildable, maintainable hardware.
- Powder handling mechanics: Hands-on experience designing for the movement, dosing, containment and transfer of fine or reactive powders, with a feel for the failure modes that matter: flow, segregation, abrasion, sealing and dust risk. This could be from pharma or food, not just from chemical or manufacturing sectors.
- The temperament to finish: You close loops, chase down root causes, and are happiest when a rig does exactly what it did yesterday.
- Build autonomy: You take a hardware problem from diagnosis to fix and iterate quickly, without waiting to be told how.
- Safe operations: Practical experience building and working to safety standards for pressure and powder-handling systems.
Valuable Experience (Nice to Have, Not Required)
- Air-sensitive handling: Inert atmosphere or glovebox transfer for reactive materials.
- Vacuum-adjacent design: Comfort designing components that interface with high-vacuum systems. Our Systems Engineer leads on vacuum, so this is helpful rather than essential.
- Instrumented systems: Working alongside controls and automation engineers on instrumented hardware.
Why Join LAYRR?
Engineering Value at the Atomic Scale
Our North Star is infinite material performance from a finite natural resource. We are reimagining our relationship with raw materials to ensure a better planet for future generations. By using our proprietary STORM physical vapour deposition (PVD) platform to functionalise powders at the nanoscale, we solve hard physical problems that unlock massive commercial impact.
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How We Work: A Culture Built for Breakthroughs
We are building a culture designed for rapid execution and deep scientific rigour. If you thrive in high-autonomy environments where data beats hierarchy and outcomes beat presenteeism, you will fit right in.
- Radical Candour (Clarity over Comfort): We believe it is kinder to be clear than to be comfortable. We share failed experiments and ugly data immediately, treating them as vital data points rather than failures. We challenge ideas openly and attack assumptions early.
- Ruthless Focus (Outcomes over Activity): We don't measure performance by hours spent at a desk or in the lab; we measure it by impact on our primary bottlenecks. We aggressively cut noise, and protect deep-work time so you can solve complex technical problems without constant distraction.
- Extreme Ownership (No "Them", Only "Us"): In a fast-moving startup, there is no one else to pass the torch to. You own your tasks, your data and your decisions. When something fails, we don't look for excuses or point fingers - we state what went wrong, fix the underlying system and move forward.
What We Offer You
- Share options available in a fast growing company
- £1000 Annual Personal Development Budget
- 30 Days Annual Leave plus your birthday off
Right to Work
You must have, or be able to obtain, the right to work in the UK. We are not currently a licensed visa sponsor. We would consider becoming one for an exceptional candidate, so if you need sponsorship, please tell us in your application rather than ruling yourself out.
How to Apply
Please apply here with your CV: https://layrr.notion.site/3a72b2ef5c0c80efaa1dd1950082daec?pvs=105.
In your application, answer these two questions. A few sentences on each is plenty (max 150 words), and we read them before anything else:
- Tell us about a hardware project you developed. What went wrong in the build, and how did you close it out?
- Describe a time an elegant design would not manufacture or would not hold tolerance, and what you did about it.
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