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.

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 mechatr

📌 Founding Mechatronics Engineer (Barcelona)
🏢 Merista
📍 Barcelona