Textile Engineer

We are looking for a passionate Textile Engineer to join our team. As a critical member of our Hardware and Testing teams, your primary responsibility will be to help guide our testing program as we pave the way in 3D weaving. We're looking for someone with extensive experience in fabric development, someone familiar with running machinery, someone skilled in sourcing materials, and someone excited about the risks and rewards of joining a Series A-funded startup.

About us

unspun is a robotics and digital apparel company, with a mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by 1% through automated, localized, and intentional manufacturing.

Included in Time's Best Inventions & Fast Company's World Changing Ideas, unspun aims to rapidly transition the trillion-dollar apparel world into one that is more intentional, inclusive, and efficient by focusing on the overlap between sustainability and profitability.

We’ve developed a proprietary and patent-pending technology at the crossroads of 3D printing and automated textile manufacturing. By skipping the flat 2D fabric stage, we can additively build custom apparel products from the ground up- straight from yarn to final product. If additive manufacturing, industrial automation, and synchronized systems of hundreds of sensors & actuators gets you excited, we’d love to talk!

About You

You enjoy working on fast-paced and early-stage R&D and bringing high quality products to market. You thrive on the lack of clear answers at the outset of high-reaching projects and look forward to finding clarity and articulating it to others. You enjoy wearing multiple hats and switching between different contexts. You are capable of working independently and in a team while being flexible, self-motivated, and curious. You have strong interpersonal skills and can help manage a complex testing program with competing needs from multiple sides of the organization. You are energized by working on big complex problems within an evolving R&D / production environment. You probably are a fabric testing nerd who gets excited around spec sheets. You enjoy daily challenges and relish the successes, even when undefined.

What You’ll Do

Help lead 3D weaving material development along with our Textile Engineers. You’ll be both hands-on with the product outputs and theoretical with the inputs. You’ll work with the Product Team and the Hardware team to create the world’s first 3D woven products.

• Develop product outputs using new manufacturing methods
• Provide insights about machine performance and reliability, especially as it relates to product outputs
• Troubleshoot weaving process challenges through experimentation using knowledge of all possible variables to achieve ideal material properties
• Operate revolutionary robotic loom to create apparel products and fabric swatches
• Direct the team’s fabric finishing steps
• Source materials for small and large-scale runs
• Work with material vendors and suppliers on testing and standards
• Conduct detailed analysis of weave quality and help brainstorm ways to iterate and improve
• Identify limitations of technical approaches and brainstorm new approaches
• Work with hardware engineering team to ideate and develop manufacturing technology
• Support the design, development, testing, and commercialization of our new weaving technology
• Interface with the team to understand testing and experiment needs, develop test plans, perform or coordinate tests, and analyze and communicate results
• Coordinate testing and new functionality integration activities with engineers and technicians
• Coordinate, plan, and execute product runs
• Support management and organization of in-house material spec sheets

Requirements

Ideal Qualities

• BS, MS, or PhD in Textile Engineering, Textile Technology, Fiber Science, Materials Science, or related fields
• Extensive experience with fabric development
• Strong knowledge of fiber and polymer science
• Experience sourcing for apparel and textile manufacturing, especially yarn
• Experience designing, conducting, and analyzing experiments
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Experience and comfort working with [ideally textile] machinery and robotics. This is not a small project, and candidate is expected to be on their feet for full days at a time.
• Able to work full time on-site in Emeryville for testing and debugging.
• Energized by new ideas in apparel and product manufacturing. Comfortable in a fast-paced early-stage startup environment. Flexible and calm in the face of ambiguity.

Bonus Points

• Manufacturing or factory experience
• Experience with weaving in the industrial setting, including yarn prep and woven draft patterning.
• Experience running fabric production
• Knowledge of fabric & garment finishing methods
• Statistical & data analysis knowledge and experience
• Project management experience
• Experience working on fast-paced early stage R&D projects
• Automation and robotics experience
• Familiarity with hardware engineering design and implementation practices
• Familiarity with basic programming concepts and patience working with beta stage software

We don't expect you to have all of the listed qualities and are looking for someone who hopes to learn those areas where they don't have as much experience. So if you don't meet all of the requirements listed above but can make up for it with a voracious passion for learning how to do so, we strongly encourage you to apply.

Our philosophy

We won’t roll our eyes if your socks don’t match. We get it. But then, if you spend those extra few minutes in the morning matching your socks and shirt, we get that too. Our workspaces are sometimes spotless and sometimes chaotic, and we celebrate messy exploration. We work through complex problems but generate simple and elegant solutions. We strive to look at things differently, and never do anything solely because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

We’re a team of designers and engineers, industry-veterans and serial entrepreneurs, artists and developers. We’re aspiring chess masters and climbers, bakers and photographers. Originally spun out of Stanford and the University of Colorado, we now call the Bay Area home, with strong ties to Hong Kong. We are looking for teammates who share our desire to work on ambitious problems and leave the world better than we found it.

unspun is an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to being a diverse team that reflects a broad range of background, thought, and experience. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, status as an individual with a disability, status as protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristics. Women, minorities, and people from underrepresented backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.

Benefits

The salary range for this role is $90,000 - $110,000 USD, annually.

Benefits include:

• self-regulated vacation policy
• comprehensive (gold & platinum) health/dental/vision insurance (or equivalent cash bonus if already insured)
• company sponsored 401k
• monthly gym membership or relevant online education grant of up to $150/month
• pre-tax commuter benefits
• incentive stock options