Job Description

About Skillz

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition.

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $68 billion in 2019 to $150 billion in 2025.

As the first publicly-traded mobile esports platform, Skillz has pioneered the future of the gaming industry. The Skillz platform helps developers build multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual esports tournaments for millions of mobile players worldwide, and distributes millions in prizes each month.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50, one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

What We’re Looking For

Our Research and Development department sets the vision for the future of the Skillz player experience in new arenas and the Hardware team is the latest addition. Skillz is a mobile social gaming platform where players compete for real prizes. We build a player experience that is visually rich with tournaments, chat, leaderboards, payments and customer support. In this role, you and the Hardware team will be building the physical representation of the Skillz brand by bringing new types of gameplay to millions of players through the development of a variety of hardware initiatives.

As a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the newly formed and quickly growing Hardware team you will be creating the processes and standards that will form the foundation of our R&D engineering organization and will lead the engineering efforts on a variety of projects from gaming controllers to AR/VR devices as we develop and explore new opportunities in the gaming space - flexibility is key in this role. The ideal candidate will have a background in consumer electronics, work well within an R&D team, and excel at mentoring less experienced coworkers.

What You’ll Do

• Redefine the future of competition and gaming hardware through the design of mechanisms, components and assemblies for products ranging from gaming controllers to AR/VR applications
• Work with ID and EE teams to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate designs
• Mentor less experienced coworkers in industry best practices, product life cycle management, and DFM
• Collaborate with internal resources and external partners from concept through the full production lifecycle
• Set testing standards, compliance requirements and best practices for engineering
• Bring industry relationships and experience to guide development
• Work cross functionally to balance cost targets, design intent and business goals in system designs with other teams
• Assist in manufacturer and supplier vetting and selection
• Work with manufacturing partners to bring successful concepts through production to market (some international travel may eventually be required)
  

Your Skillz

• Experience building out engineering processes and leading projects that shipped product on time and within budget
• Mechanical engineer with 8+ years of relevant experience
• Bachelor's degree or advanced degree in Mechanical Engineering
• Relevant experience in gaming, consumer electronics or robotics
• Hands-on prototyping experience
• Solid understanding of material properties
• Expertise in part/assembly design for manufacturing, 3D modeling (we use Solidworks and Fusion 360)
• Experience working with and/or setting up PLM systems to track and maintain engineering data
• Experience working with suppliers and vendors (ODM, CDM, CM models)
• Strong verbal and written communication skills