Mechanical Engineer (Onsite)

Alchemy is currently in search of a Mechanical Engineer in Waterloo, ON.

About Us

Alchemy is a nanotechnology company building breakthrough solutions for the automotive and defence industries. We're transforming legacy sectors by vertically integrating our proprietary nanocoatings into category-defining, ready-to-use products. Our flagship technologies:

· ExoShield: the world's leading windshield protection film for the automotive aftermarket

· Crypsis Class: a multispectral camouflage coating platform for defence applications

We are at the growth-stage of our journey and are focused on sustainable top-line growth across both our automotive and defence business units. Alchemy is backed by leading investors and incubators in Canada, USA, and France such as Y-Combinator, Stanford-StartX, Pathfinder, Pembroke, NameSilo, and more. Our team is a diverse, tight knit group of engineers, scientists, and business professionals that likes to spend time together in and out of the office, whether that is weekly badminton nights or team lunches. We are a team passionate about cars, cool technology, and working together to dominate the market segments we operate in.

You can learn more about Alchemy at: www.alchemynano.com

About the Role

We're hiring a Mechanical Engineer to take our automotive products from design intent to repeatable production. Our products are precision-fit: each one is engineered to a specific vehicle, which means complex freeform geometry, custom tooling, and tightly controlled manufacturing processes that have to hit both dimensional and optical quality targets. This role owns that engineering chain end to end - digitizing and modelling geometry, designing and sourcing the tooling required to make it, developing and qualifying the process, validating the result, and handing a documented, repeatable process to Manufacturing.

This is a deliberately broad, hands-on individual-contributor role. You will be the technical authority on design and process decisions and the person who sets the standards the rest of the team works to. You'll mentor one to two mechanical engineers and co-op students and help raise the technical bar of the team, but your value comes from your own judgment, CAD, and time on the floor rather than from managing headcount. You'll report to the Head of Automotive Technology and work daily with Product, Operations, and Manufacturing.

Salary up to $125,000.00 + equity (experience dependent)

Onsite - Waterloo - 5 days a week

Responsibilities

Design and CAD

Model complex freeform geometry and reverse-engineer parts from 3D measurement data

Own the design standards that drive fit, manufacturability and quality - tolerances, surface treatment, design rules, and part categorization

Lead design reviews and act as the technical approver before designs are committed to tooling

Improve the design pipeline itself: better methods, templates, and automation to remove repetitive work

Tooling

Specify, design and source custom tooling and fixtures, including materials, construction, service conditions, tolerances and inspection criteria

Own tooling through its lifecycle - commissioning, durability, rework and replacement

Balance tooling cost against performance and life, and make the tradeoff explicit rather than implicit

Process development and production handoff

Develop and qualify manufacturing processes for polymer and film-based products, including thermal and pressure-driven forming and finishing operations

Establish robust process windows and understand how the key variables interact, rather than tuning by feel

Diagnose defects to root cause, using structured experimentation and retained evidence

Release processes only when quality, repeatability and durability requirements are all met

Hand processes to Manufacturing with complete work instructions, setup requirements and QC criteria so production can run them without engineering intervention

Support production troubleshooting, equipment tooling, consumable specification and maintenance requirements

Suppliers and cost

Manage tooling, machining and fabrication suppliers: specifications, quoting, purchase orders, quality expectations and technical escalations

Drive cost and cycle-time reduction by evaluating alternative materials, manufacturing routes and sourcing options - with a clear view of the risk each option carries

Build the business case for capital and tooling investment alongside Product and Operations

Testing, validation and engineering data

Define and run test plans: dimensional and optical inspection, functional fit, and accelerated durability and environmental testing

Use DOE and root-cause analysis to answer real product questions rather than settling for one-off trials

Own the engineering record - specifications, SOPs, part and process libraries, and the reporting leadership uses to see program status

Leave the team better documented than you found it: knowledge that lives only in one person's head is a defect in this role's eyes

Team and cross-functional

Mentor one to two mechanical engineers and co-op students - design reviews, CAD coaching and process discipline - without formal people-management responsibility

Partner with Product on requirements and prioritization; with Operations and Manufacturing on scalability, yield and QC; and with our formulation and testing teams on material behaviour

Qualifications

Required:

Must have at a least a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related field

3+ years of hands-on mechanical design and process engineering experience in a manufacturing or product development environment

Expert-level 3D CAD, with real strength in surfacing - modelling and reverse engineering complex freeform geometry, not just prismatic parts (SolidWorks preferred)

Experience working with 3D measurement or scan data: point clouds, mesh processing, alignment and deviation analysis, and building manufacturable surfaces from imperfect data

Demonstrated ownership of tooling, mold, die or fixture design through to a working production process

Practical process development experience - you have taken a process from "it worked once" to "production runs it every day without you"

Strong grasp of how materials behave under heat, load and time: thermal expansion, springback and relaxation, and why a part that looks right at the machine can fail later.

We may use AI to help with the screening and interviewing process.