Outsourced Mechanical Engineering Team.
Senior industrial design and mechanical engineering on a monthly retainer, embedded in your team, from proof of concept to manufacture-ready.
Companies we have worked with:
Four steps from first call to manufacture-ready.
- 0120 to 30 min
Discovery call
We walk through the product, the stage you are at, and where mechanical is currently blocking the roadmap. You get an honest read on whether we are the right team, including when we are not.
- 022 to 4 weeks
Design sprint
A fixed-fee starter project aimed at one clear deliverable. It gives you real output, a working relationship, and a realistic view of pace before anything ongoing is signed.
- 03Every week
Iterate weekly
Once the retainer starts we ship in weekly cycles. You see CAD, drawings, and renders as they land, review them in your own tools, and steer the next week in a short call. Nothing waits for a monthly reveal.
- 04At release
Manufacture-ready handoff
Every program ends in a release package your supplier can quote and build from: native CAD, neutral formats, dimensioned drawings, BOM, and a change log. If you hire in-house later, the files are in a state a new engineer can inherit on day one.
Concrete deliverables, not a slide deck.
CAD models
Production-grade CAD built as part of our mechanical engineering services. Parametric assemblies built for change, with feature trees a future engineer can read, delivered natively and as STEP.
Enclosure design
Housings, brackets, seals, and mounts designed around your real electronics stack-up, thermal path, and ingress requirements rather than a generic box.
DFM review
Part consolidation, draft, wall thickness, bend allowance, and fastener strategy reviewed against your supplier's actual capability before tooling money is committed.
Prototype support
3D printing, CNC, and sheet fabrication coordinated with your shops or ours. We chase quotes, check incoming parts, and turn iterations in days.
Manufacturing drawings
ASME Y14.5 GD&T drawing packages with datum schemes and inspection callouts, so the shop can quote and inspect on the first pass.
3D renders
Photoreal stills and product motion built straight from the engineering CAD, ready for a deck, a data sheet, or a launch page before tooling comes back.
Questions we get asked.
What do mechanical engineering services actually include?
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For us they include concept and production CAD, FEA, tolerance stack-ups, DFM against your chosen process, GD&T drawing packages, and prototype build management. In practice it is everything between a validated electronics concept and a package your supplier can quote from. Visualization and industrial design sit in the same retainer when a program needs them.
How are mechanical design services different from hiring one engineer?
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One senior hire covers one discipline and starts in three to six months. Our mechanical design services give you a team that starts next week and spans CAD, analysis, DFM, and drawings. You also avoid the single point of failure that comes with a program owned by one person.
What industries do you engineer for?
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Robotics and automation, defense and aerospace, climate and energy hardware, medical and lab devices, and industrial machinery. The common thread is B2B or B2G hardware that has to pass real qualification, not consumer goods designed for a retail shelf.
How fast can we start?
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Usually within a week of the discovery call. Most teams begin with a two to four week fixed-fee design sprint on one clear deliverable, then move into a monthly retainer once the workload for the next quarter is clear.
Mechanical engineering services without the headcount
Most funded hardware startups reach a moment where the electronics work, the concept is validated, and the whole company is waiting on mechanical. Enclosures, brackets, thermal paths, tolerance stacks, drawings for the shop. Hiring a full outsourced mechanical engineering team to answer that need takes six months of recruiting and three permanent salaries before the first drawing lands.
Lucent gives you that department on a monthly retainer. Our mechanical engineering services cover the whole path from concept CAD to release package, and our mechanical design services sit next to industrial design rather than downstream of it. A senior mechanical engineer leads the work, backed by an industrial designer and a visualization lead when the project needs them. We plug into your PDM, your Slack, your weekly review, and treat your roadmap the way an internal team would.
Capabilities inside the retainer.
One embedded team, one monthly fee. Scroll through what sits inside the contract, from first sketch to release package.
06 capabilities
- 01 / 06
Production-grade CAD in Fusion 360
Parametric assemblies built for change. Feature trees your next engineer can read. Native handoff to the electronics team through STEP and neutral formats.
- 02 / 06
FEA and tolerance analysis
Static and modal FEA for load-bearing housings and mounts. Worst-case tolerance stack-ups against real fastener and molding constraints, not textbook numbers.
- 03 / 06
GD&T drawing packages
ASME Y14.5 compliant drawings the shop can quote from on the first pass. Datum schemes, feature control frames, and inspection callouts scoped to the part's real function.
- 04 / 06
DFM for injection molding, sheet metal, CNC
Part consolidation, draft, wall thickness, gate location, bend allowance. We design against the process, and against your supplier's actual capability, from the first sketch.
- 05 / 06
Prototype build management
3D printing, CNC, sheet fabrication, silicone tooling. We coordinate with your shops or ours, chase quotes, and turn iterations around in days instead of weeks.
- 06 / 06
Release engineering and change control
BOMs, ECOs, revision packages, and the boring-but-critical documentation layer that keeps a design shippable through DFM, FAI, and pilot run.
Want to see whether a retainer fits your roadmap?
When is an outsourced mechanical engineering team the right call?
Building an outsourced mechanical engineering team in-house is the right long-term move once you are shipping continuously and have three or more concurrent hardware programs. Before that point, one full-time mechanical engineer will spend half their week idle between milestones, and their skill set will only cover part of what a real hardware program needs.
A retainer with Lucent is the alternative to building the team in-house before the workload justifies it. You get senior CAD, FEA, GD&T, and DFM under one contract, at a flat monthly fee, with no recruiting cycle and no ramp period. When the program grows past what a retainer can hold, we help you hire the internal lead and hand over the CAD, drawings, and change history cleanly.
How do you work alongside our existing engineering team?
We are used to being the mechanical engineering seat inside a company that already has firmware, electronics, and product management. We sit in your standups, review PRs on the enclosure side of the repo, and keep the CAD library in the state your future hire will inherit.
For teams that already have a mechanical engineer, we act as a force multiplier: we take second and third product variants off their plate, run DFM in parallel with a supplier they already trust, and stand up drawing packages so the lead engineer can stay on the roadmap.
How the retainer works.
- 0120–30 min
Intro call
We learn the solution, the stage, and what is blocking you. No pitch, no slide deck.
- 022–4 weeks
Design sprint
A fixed-fee starter project on one clear deliverable, so you see how we work before any ongoing commitment.
- 031 session
Sprint review
We present the work and map the next 90 days together, what to build, what to validate, what to leave alone.
- 04Monthly
Retainer
We scope the real workload and send a proposal for a fixed monthly fee. Embedded team, no time-tracking, cancel with notice.
Common questions.
- Fusion 360 is our primary CAD environment. We deliver native Fusion files, STEP, and 2D drawing PDFs. We can work in SolidWorks or Onshape when your existing library requires it, but the retainer runs most efficiently when we own the parametric model in Fusion.
- Yes. We rebuild the feature tree if the incoming CAD is not parametric, or we work inside the existing model when it is well constructed. Either way we start with a design intent review so the mechanical engineering team is not guessing about tolerances or fits that were never documented.
- Yes. Static and modal FEA for structural housings, brackets, and mounts, plus worst-case and RSS tolerance stack-ups. For tests that require accredited results, we coordinate the report with an external lab and integrate their findings back into the CAD.
- We produce ASME Y14.5 GD&T drawings and manage revisions inside your PDM if you have one, or through a shared Fusion Team hub if not. Every release ships with a full BOM, an ECO log, and the model tree tagged to the drawing revision.
- Yes. We run DFM reviews with your CM, respond to their questions in their format, and manage first-article inspection reports. If you do not have a CM yet, we can introduce suppliers we have worked with on comparable programs.
Let's design your next solution, together.
Tell us where the solution is and what's blocking you, we'll tell you honestly whether a retainer makes sense, or what we'd do instead.