What the work involves

You will spend most of your time producing and auditing FreeCAD models against written specifications. In practice that means: building parametric parts and assemblies with a sketch and constraint structure that survives dimension changes, generating TechDraw sheets with correct views, sections, and GD&T callouts, and writing up the design intent behind your choices. A second stream of work is engineering QA — you receive a model (often produced by a model, sometimes by another contractor) and have to determine whether it actually satisfies the spec, where it is under- or over-constrained, whether the tolerance scheme is manufacturable, and how to say so precisely enough that the disagreement is machine-readable.

The AI angle rarely requires AI knowledge. What the customer needs is a record of how an experienced mechanical engineer decides that a model is wrong, and why. Your written rationale — datum selection, feature order, DFM objection, fit class — is often worth more than the .FCStd file itself.

What the platform screens for

micro1 uses an AI-led interview that asks about your background and then probes it. Expect follow-ups that go a layer deeper than your first answer: which constraint solver behaviour bit you, how you handled a topological naming failure, what datum scheme you'd pick for a specific part and why not the obvious one. Vague CAD fluency reads badly; specific projects with specific tolerances read well.

  • FreeCAD specifically is preferred, but strong SolidWorks/Fusion/Inventor/NX experience plus honest FreeCAD familiarity is commonly accepted.
  • Python scripting for CAD automation is a rate lever, not a gate.
  • GD&T is treated as real domain depth, not a checkbox — expect to be asked to defend a tolerance choice.

Logistics

Fully remote and contractor-based. Work is largely asynchronous against task queues with deadlines rather than fixed shifts, though some projects run calibration or review calls in US-overlapping hours. Volume is project-driven and can fluctuate; many contributors treat it as 10–25 hours a week alongside other work. You supply your own machine capable of running FreeCAD comfortably.