I was in a similar situation 3 years ago, except instead of engineers it was a couple of metal fab guys that I knew through a family connection.
I came in initially for a few days just to model up a really basic product in Solidworks, literally a simple tray with some ribs, and make an engineering drawing of it. They had some other fun ideas for products they wanted to make and made me a part time offer, which sounded great given that I was straight out of uni and wanted to get paid, and I accepted.
It turned out that they didn’t really know what industrial designers actually did, and had assumed that my sole skillset was making 3D models and drawings in Solidworks. I was working in a side bubble to their day-today business on R+D for products that they wanted to develop, which ended up being a fun role and I was actually there for just over 3 years in total.
While I learnt a lot about business processes and client interactions, I found that the design process itself was difficult to keep moving forwards without an experienced designer to bounce off and learn from, and that the general assumption was that 4 years of uni had taught me everything I needed to know to create a design masterpiece and to take it from brief to production.
This isn’t realistic, and from my personal experience I would stay away from soloing as a graduate as your design and communication skills will develop far better and more quickly with practised designers surrounding you.
I would ask:
-Have they had industrial designers in-house before? Do they know what an industrial designer does?
-Do they know that you won’t be able to push a product through development like someone with 10-20 years of working experience?
-Do they expect everything concept to be made completely within Solidworks/3D CAD for any kind of discussion? Or can they happily discuss a sketch (“pretty picture” as I’ve heard it called in the past) of a concept?