Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, Plastics

Location: Bengaluru (on-site)
Experience: 3 to 5 years
Reports to: Head of Design Engineering
About Native
Native is the product company inside Urban Company, India’s leading online home-services platform, which also runs in the UAE, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Last year we serviced millions of households, and our service professionals worked on more than five million appliances.
That gives a designer something rare. While other appliance brands learn about their products through surveys and returns, we learn from the technician who was in a customer’s kitchen this morning, saw what broke, and saw what the customer was working around. This gives us the leverage to design for needs nobody says out loud.
Native launched in October 2023 with a purifier that needs no service for two years. In 2026, we launched the M3 line of RO water purifiers that run on one set of filters for three years. We also make smart locks, and there’s more in the pipeline.
What gets designed here ends up in lakhs of homes.
About the role
We're looking for an engineer who designs from physics, not from precedent. You'll take an ambiguous product requirement and turn it into a plastic (and metal) component or subsystem that works, can be built, and fails gracefully. You'll own the reasoning behind every feature: why this wall thickness, this material, this joint, this tolerance.
CAD is just how you record decisions. We're hiring you for the decisions.
What you'll own
Requirements to architecture. Translate product and user requirements into engineering specs (loads, environments, life, interfaces, cost etc.. ). Then define component architecture and how parts come together, before any detailed CAD.
Engineering analysis and sizing. Use hand calculations first to size features and predict behavior: Plastic part beam deflection and stress, snap-fit strain, boss and screw retention, creep under sustained load, thermal expansion mismatch between plastic and metal, impact and drop energy,
Material selection from first principles. Choose polymers (and metals where needed) from functional need: stiffness, strength over temperature, creep, fatigue, chemical and UV exposure, flammability, and cost. You should be able to explain the trade-offs against at least two alternatives.
Mechanism and joint design. Hinges, latches, snap-fits, sealing and gaskets, threaded and press-fit inserts, welded and adhesive joints, overmolded interfaces.
Design-side DFX. Build manufacturability, assembly, serviceability, and cost into the concept from day one. Understand enough about plastic molding and basic metal processes (sheet metal, machining) to know what's expensive, risky, or impossible, and design around it.
DFMEA as a thinking tool. Identify how your design can fail, why, and what design decisions prevent it.
Tolerancing. Define functional tolerances and GD&T based on what the design actually needs, and back them with stack-ups.
Validation. Define what must be proven, design the test plan (DVP), interpret results, and redesign when the physics says so.
Failure investigation. When parts fail in tests or in the field, lead the root-cause analysis back to the design decision, understanding on 8D principle
Design decisions with downstream consequences. Own every aspect of plastic part design, and understand DFX well enough to trace each decision forward to its effect in mass production and in the field
CAD, drawings, and release. Own the design intent behind every model and drawing, both why it's built that way and how it's documented, across all development phases
Must-have
B.E./B.Tech or M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (or Plastics/Polymer with strong mechanics).
3 to 5 years of product design experience, including at least one plastic-intensive product or subsystem you shaped from concept to launch.
Strong mechanics fundamentals: strength of materials, elastic and plastic behavior, fatigue, heat transfer, tolerances. You should be able to do the math on paper.
Real understanding of polymer behavior and why it differs from metal: viscoelasticity, creep, temperature dependence, anisotropy from flow, moisture effects.
Working knowledge of plastic design principles along with DFM and their reasons: wall uniformity, ribs, draft, radii, bosses, weld-line effects.etc..
Hands-on DFMEA, GD&T, and tolerance stack-up experience.
DFM knowledge for injection molding plus common metal processes.
First principles thinking
Good to have
FEA for plastics (nonlinear materials, contact, snap-fit analysis).
Experience with consumer electronics / appliances / automotive / medical products.
Prototyping experience (3D printing, soft tooling) used to test hypotheses quickly.
Patents or invention disclosures.
Who you are
First-principles thinker (non-negotiable). You don't accept "that's how it's always done." When you face a new problem, you start from loads, materials, and constraints, estimate the answer, then check it.
High ownership. You own the outcome, not the task. If your part fails, you want to know why before anyone asks.
Comfortable with ambiguity. You can work from incomplete requirements and help define them.
Clear communicator. You can explain a design trade-off to industrial design, manufacturing, and leadership.

Work arrangement
No