About SharkNinja
SharkNinja is a global product design and technology company behind the Shark and Ninja brands, creating household appliances — from vacuums and hair care to kitchen systems and frozen-treat makers — used in millions of homes worldwide. The company is known for its fast-paced, consumer-obsessed engineering culture and rapid product development cycles.
My role
I spent June to August 2026 at SharkNinja's global headquarters in Needham, Massachusetts, as a Mechanical Engineering Intern on the New Product Development team. My work centred on the structural architecture of a new frozen-treat product — how the housing carries load, how that load could be measured rather than estimated, and how design changes could be compared objectively instead of by feel.
Key contributions
- Owned structural architecture work on a new frozen-treat product: redesigned the housing load path to cut the moment about the gearbox center, and correlated vertical motor current to frame load by stalling the DC drive into a 10 kN load cell, so any recipe run's structural load could be inferred from current alone.
- Built a computer-vision method using ArUco markers to measure C-frame opening from video — contactless, sub-millimeter, self-calibrating — then reran it on every structural hack and CAD revision, turning stiffness from a subjective judgment into a repeatable measured comparison.
- Validated the CAD revisions on hardware by running 10 recipes across springs spanning 10–30 N, selecting the preload that kept the blade from stalling on the hardest recipes while still meeting KPIs on freeze-point detection, cycle time, and unit-to-unit repeatability.
- Partnered with Product Design on user touchpoints — cup retention, insertion feel, and rattle — translating ID intent into a bayonet-retained bushing assembly modeled in SolidWorks with tolerancing and printed fit validation.
Skills developed
The through-line of the summer was measurement: most of what I built existed to replace an opinion with a number. That reframed how I approach mechanical design — before arguing that a structure is stiffer, find a way to prove it, and make the proof cheap enough to repeat on every revision.
Structural design & analysis
- Load-path design — reshaping a housing so the moment about a critical component is reduced rather than reacted
- Stiffness and deflection characterisation of a C-frame structure under real operating loads
- Spring rate and preload selection against competing failure modes and performance targets
Instrumentation & measurement
- Load cell calibration and stall testing to build a current-to-load transfer function, turning an existing motor into a load sensor with no added hardware
- Computer vision for metrology: ArUco fiducial tracking for contactless, self-calibrating, sub-millimeter displacement measurement from ordinary video
- Designing repeatable test methods — controlling for the variables that make a comparison meaningful, and reusing one method across many design revisions
CAD & prototyping
- SolidWorks part and assembly modeling for a mechanism with real fit constraints
- Tolerancing for assembly, and validating fits on printed hardware rather than on screen
- Designing a bayonet retention feature to hit a specified insertion and retention feel
Engineering judgment & collaboration
- Trading off competing KPIs — freeze-point detection, cycle time and unit-to-unit repeatability — rather than optimising one in isolation
- Testing against worst-case conditions instead of nominal ones
- Working with Product Design to translate industrial-design intent into a manufacturable mechanism, including subjective qualities like rattle and insertion feel
- Working inside a high-velocity NPD organisation, where a design change is only worth proposing if you can show the data behind it