Mechatronics Engineer, VLA Gripping & Assembly (Lead)

About the Position

Mechatronics Engineer, VLA Gripping & Assembly (Lead)

Sorting Robotics is hiring a Lead Mechatronics Engineer for their VLA gripping and assembly system in Los Angeles, CA.

Salary: $170K - $190K per year

Job type: Full-time

Location: Los Angeles, CA, US

About the Role

Sorting Robotics builds and deploys robotic systems for real manufacturing floors. We are hiring the Cognizant Engineer (CogE) to own our next flagship: a VLA-powered (Vision-Language-Action) gripping and assembly system. You will lead this product from the rig on the bench to machines running in customers' facilities, and own its technical success end to end.

This is a hands-on technical leadership seat. You will design the end-effector and mechatronics, integrate vision and force/tactile sensing into a 6DOF arm, and operationalize learned manipulation policies (VLA models) so the system reliably grips, places, and assembles in the real world. You work directly with the founder.

Responsibilities

• The VLA gripping and assembly system cradle to grave: concept, design, build, bring-up, deployment, and field reliability.
• Gripper and mechatronics design: end-effector, actuation, GD&T, rapid prototyping (3D print, laser, CNC, PCB), production-ready designs.
• Perception and sensing in the manipulation loop: vision, force/torque, tactile, and the 6DOF arm.
• Operationalizing VLA / learned policies: demonstration data pipeline, policy inference into real-time control, grasp/assembly evaluation, sim-to-real iteration.

Requirements

• 6+ years taking robotic systems from concept to delivery.
• Identify as an AI native engineer.
• Real gripper / end-effector / manipulation experience and 6DOF arm integration.
• Comfort at the hardware + ML boundary: you do not have to train VLAs from scratch, but you can integrate learned policies, run inference on a robot, curate demo data, and debug why a grasp fails (ROS/ROS 2, OpenVLA / pi-0 style policies, imitation learning, sim-to-real a strong plus).
• Strong Python and physical prototyping tools (CAD, 3D printing, CNC, PCB).

About the Interview

Our process is fast and respects your time:

1. Technical call with the founder (30 min): the role, the system, and your background.
2. Technical deep-dive #1 (60 min)
3. Technical deep-dive #2 (60 min)
4. Onsite technical presentation and full day interview.
5. Final conversation and offer.

We can start strong candidates as a contractor within a week or two and convert to full-time, or go straight to full-time. We move quickly and we decide quickly.

About Sorting Robotics

We build computer vision powered robots that automate and improve human-centric processes for companies.

Our first robot sorted Magic: The Gathering cards and we sold units to the biggest trading card companies in the North American market. As of Fall 2019 we sold that product line and pivoted into focusing solely on automation for the blossoming cannabis industry.

Our most recent system sorts biomass, and looks to improve the efficiencies of all downstream processes by removing undesirable waste material, in addition to allowing customers to sort by size, color, strain, and more.

We are currently working on automation for oil cartridge filling, and improving the efficiency of packaging processes in the cannabis industry by introducing novel robotics to join processes together.

Founded: 2018

Team Size: 12

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Founders

• Nohtal Partansky
• Cassio Santos Jr