Head of Mechanical Engineering

About the role

HEAD OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING — GROUNDED Detroit, MI (in-person) ABOUT GROUNDED Grounded is a 25-person Detroit-based startup building modular electric platforms for specialty vehicles. We take cab chassis from OEMs like Ford and Harbinger and build configurable vehicle systems on top, serving mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more. Our customers include Colgate, Nokia, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and Portland PD. We've raised ~$5M in VC funding and are shipping vehicles in market today. We also build our own software: a mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that lets customers monitor and control vehicle systems remotely. We design, fabricate, and assemble everything in-house at our facility in Corktown. THE ROLE We're hiring a Head of Mechanical Engineering to lead our team and own the most important engineering challenge at Grounded: building a truly modular vehicle platform that enables mass customization at scale. Today, our engineers do significant custom design work for each new customer and use case. That doesn't scale. We need to get to a system where the vehicle infrastructure (the box, the walls, the plumbing, the electrical routing, the mechanical attachment points) is universal, and customers choose from a library of modules that plug in. A salesperson should be able to configure a vehicle with a customer without an engineer touching it, unless there's a module that hasn't been designed yet. The person who leads this defines how Grounded scales from a 25-person shop to a 250-person company. This is a player-coach leadership role. You'll build and lead the mechanical engineering team and set technical direction and standards, but you'll stay hands-on in CAD and on the shop floor. And you'll do it while the business is actively shipping: we have a production backlog and can't pause to go heads-down on R&D for six months, so you'll balance delivering current customer vehicles with driving toward the modular system. WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY DO - Lead, mentor, hire, and grow the mechanical engineering team; own how engineers ramp, develop, and do their best work - Set the technical vision and standards for mechanical design across customer vehicles and the modular platform itself - Own the architecture of the modular system — standardized attachment points, interfaces, BOMs, and a module library — so vehicles can be configured without bespoke engineering on every deal - Be accountable for engineering delivery against the production backlog while carving out time to iterate toward modularity - Stay hands-on: design complex assemblies in Siemens NX (hundreds to thousands of components per vehicle) and work daily with the technician team who build everything in-house - Think at the systems level across mechanical, plumbing, and electrical integration (you won't do electrical design, but you need to understand how it all comes together) - Partner with software engineers on automating the design and manufacturing workflow: parametric design, dynamic BOM generation, automated work instructions - Establish lightweight engineering processes that scale the team without adding bureaucracy, and partner with the leadership team on roadmap and resourcing WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 10+ years of mechanical design/engineering experience, including leading and managing engineers (team lead, engineering manager, or principal with leadership scope) - Track record taking physical products — not just components — from concept through production, ideally in automotive, commercial vehicles, EV, or industrial equipment - Strong, current, hands-on CAD ability (NX preferred, but SolidWorks, CATIA, etc. with willingness to learn NX works) - Deep design-for-manufacturability expertise: welded structures, sheet metal, tubed aluminum, fastening systems. You think about how things get built, not just how they look in CAD - Systems-level thinker who can hold an entire vehicle in their head — both current builds and future modularity — and define platform architecture - Comfortable on a shop floor, next to the technicians, watching designs get built and iterating in real time - Startup or small-company experience strongly preferred. You thrive with ambiguity, move fast, and build process only where it earns its keep - Experience hiring and building engineering teams NICE-TO-HAVES - Experience architecting modular, configurable, or platform-based product lines - Familiarity with automation tools: scripting, parametric design, programmatic CAD generation - Experience with composites, CNC routing, or additive manufacturing COMPENSATION Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in Grounded + comprehensive health insurance WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT This is the rare leadership role where you'll define both the team and the system. You'll design a kitchen module on Monday and a police command center layout on Friday — and then step back and figure out how to make all of those the same configurable platform. You'll own the engineering challenge that determines how Grounded scales, you'll do it hands-on shipping real vehicles across dozens of verticals, and you'll work directly with the leadership team every day in a place where every engineer has real ownership and impact.