Mechanical Design Engineer

 

Location: World Food Center Ede

Type: Full-Time Position

Start: Early 2024

 

SAIA’s Vision

Our vision is that it should be feasible for every community to have local, fresh and excellent quality food within reach. The global demand for healthy fruit and vegetables is doubling, but the supply is also under severe pressure due to climate change and declining availability of labour.

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We consider high-tech greenhouse horticulture as the perfect solution to provide a controlled climate, with less use of land, water and fertilizers and at the same time achieve higher yields. Our mechanization can greatly simplify the work in the greenhouse, creating optimal interplay between people, plants and machines.

 

Function description

The Hardware Engineering Team at SAIA is currently busy developing the automated systems that will cultivate, transport and process the plants in our future customer's greenhouses. The hardware team consists of very creative, enthusiastic and ambitious engineers, some of whom are very strong in generating new and innovative ideas, and others who are strong in executing the ideas to create manufacturable designs.

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Saia has built its own 1000m2 greenhouse next to the railway station at Ede. Right now, we are building and testing our first iteration of our automated system. The goal of team hardware is to ready our systems to be deployed at our first client. We use our greenhouse to test your concepts and technical iterations in close-knit cooperation with team software and team plant.

 

The hardware team's short-term goal is to develop a successful first manufacturable and efficient iteration of our automated system that achieves specific business objectives and to improve that design over time into a more mature and mass-producible design for the production version of our automated cultivation system.

 

The team is currently in need of a multi-talented engineer with both creative concept design skills, but also the necessary knowledge and skills to translate a rough concept into a manufacturable and, above all, efficient design, so that these designs can be scaled up and produced in large quantities in the future.

 

Key responsibilities

• Creating concepts and designs within the framework of simplicity, technical feasibility, cost-efficiency and accuracy, under the guidance of the project lead engineer.

• Creating components and assemblies in a 3D and 2D environment, and detailed production drawings in accordance with appropriate manufacturing standards.

• Compiling component specifications and parts lists.

• Implementing technical changes to designs.

• Carrying out revisions and updates of production drawings, parts lists and assemblies.

 

Experience and skills

• Experienced with product development.

• Proficient with 3D CAD software.

• Experienced in writing technical documentation such as design documents, presentations and reports.

• Able to perform static and dynamic calculations, simulations (FEA), and to perform tolerance analysis.

• Experienced in troubleshooting and resolving quality issues as early as possible for product improvement.

• Skilled in building and testing prototypes.

• Knowledge of Design for Manufacturing and Design for Assembly methodologies.

• Being able to closely work with other disciplines, identify where connections need to be made between teams to tackle technical challenges.