Merista builds the physical AI workforce for food production. This is our founding team hardware hire, reporting to the CTO, owning the robot's body that we can build repeatedly, clean, maintain, and operate on a factory floor. Full-time and on-site in Barcelona.

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The Challenge

Food changes shape, sticks to tools, and behaves differently as containers empty. The robot has to handle it accurately, meet the pace of the line, and work in cold, wet environments where cleaning is part of daily operation.

The hard problems are connected:

How do we handle fragile and irregular ingredients, release them reliably, and make the tools easy to clean?
How do we achieve accurate portions on a mobile base that isn't bolted to the floor?
How do we protect components from moisture and cleaning chemicals while managing heat inside sealed enclosures?
How do we turn a working prototype into robots that are straightforward to assemble, service, and repair within a tight cost target?

What you'd own

You'll lead hardware design choices and define interfaces with the engineers responsible for perception, learning, and control. You'll also help shape who joins the hardware team and how it works. Your responsibility continues when the robot leaves the workshop.

Structure and mobile base: stiffness, levelling, component layout, and access for maintenance.
End-tools and utensils: mechanisms for deformable, fragile, sticky, and irregular ingredients.
Hygiene and environmental protection: cleanability, sealing, corrosion, condensation, protective covers, and thermal design.
Sensing and weighing integration: working with robotics engineers to make measurement and manipulation reliable.
Components, suppliers, and cost: owning the bill of materials and making explicit tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and build cost.
Build and validation: prototypes, test rigs, assembly jigs, failure investigation, and a repeatable build process for a small fleet.

What you bring

Experience taking mechatronics devices from design through build, testing, and production use.
Strong mechanical design fundamentals, including tolerances, wear, sealing, and service life.
Hands-on prototyping and debugging: you can move between CAD, the workshop, and a failing machine.
Experience selecting components and suppliers and owning a bill of materials against a cost target.
Evidence that you can turn an ambiguous problem into useful experiments and make decisions from the results.
Willingness to work across mechanical, electrical, sensing, and software boundaries.

Experience with food equipment, washdown environments, hygienic design, thermal management, weighing, or European machinery safety would be useful. You don't need to arrive with all of it. You do need to recognize where specialist knowledge is required and learn quickly.

Show us something you built, what broke, and how you improved it. We're interested in the decisions you made, including what you simplified, what you tested, and which tradeoffs you accepted.

About us

Most meals in the developed world pass through a food factory. The hardest and most repetitive manipulation tasks on the line still defeat machines, like portioning and assembling real food in small batches that frequently change. So people do them by hand in cold and wet rooms. Factories cannot keep those rooms staffed.

Merista builds the physical AI workforce for food production: operated robots that take over these tasks. One robot rolls onto a factory floor without rebuilding the line. We deploy it and run it, and the factory pays for the work it does.

We've already built and operated a multi-site robotic fleet for restaurants, dealt with production failures, field operations, remote recovery, hardware iteration, deployments and customers. Now we're starting again with a much more ambitious technical thesis.

Our long-term vision is the self-driving food factory. The work today is one task at a time.

Why join at this stage

The core hardware choices are still open. Your decisions will shape how the robot handles food, how easily we can manufacture and maintain it, and what the rest of the system can achieve.

Because we will operate the robots, you'll see the consequences of your designs directly. A difficult repair, an unreliable seal, or a tool that holds onto food becomes evidence for the next iteration. Building that feedback into the engineering process is part of this job.

As the team grows, you can deepen your technical ownership or move toward team leadership. We value both paths.

Expect hardware delays, repeated experiments, and production debugging alongside new development. Part of the job is standing on a factory floor at 6am, watching a robot fail, and working with the team to understand what needs to change. We always find ways to adapt, improvise, and overcome. xqysrnh If you enjoy owning the whole path from an idea to a working machine, there is a great deal here to build.

Founding Mechatronics Engineer

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