Head of Hardware

What You Will Do

• Own the hardware roadmap for Shift and Atlas data capture: wearables, sensor rigs, camera systems, and prototype robots. What we build, in what order, and why.

• Set the system architecture across electrical, firmware, and mechanical: sensors, compute, power, wireless, and enclosures. Make the trade-offs, and make them stick when disciplines disagree.

• Stay on the bench: schematics, layout reviews, board bring-up, and a scope in your hands when the team is stuck. On the days it matters, you are the best electrical engineer in the room.

• Lead and grow the team: hire, set the bar, run design reviews, and give engineers ownership of whole subsystems rather than tickets.

• Guarantee data quality end to end: EMG and EEG front ends, camera pipelines, IMUs, and synchronization across many devices, so that what reaches the ML team is clean, time-aligned, and trustworthy.

• Take designs from prototype to small-batch production: DFM, component and EMS vendors, test fixtures, certification, and field reliability.

• Work shoulder to shoulder with ML and deployment. Your hardware decides what the training data looks like, and you will be on the floor where it is captured.

• Run contractors and partners without losing ownership of the result.
  

• You have taken at least one product from zero to shipped, with significant ownership of the outcome: as a co-founder, CTO, first hardware hire, or the lead who owned the whole device. Not one subsystem, not one phase. Ideally a wearable, at a tier-one hardware company known for shipping at scale.

• Electrical engineering is your home discipline. You have designed boards that shipped, across mixed-signal, power, wireless, and high-speed digital, and you can still do it today.

• You think in systems. You understand how an electrode choice, an enclosure tolerance, and an ADC sample rate interact, and you can hold the mechanical and firmware conversations as a peer, not a customer.

• You have led engineers: hired them, grown them, and kept a team shipping through 0-to-1 ambiguity. Typically 6+ years in hardware, but we care more about what you shipped than how long it took.

• A strong understanding of how hardware decisions affect data quality. You know that a great model on a noisy signal still loses to a decent model on a clean one, and you design accordingly.

• Experience taking hardware to small-batch production: DFM, vendor and EMS management, test, and certification.

• Genuinely curious about ML: you read papers, you have trained at least one model end to end, and you understand that dataset quality beats model architecture choice.

• High agency: you don't wait to be told what to do. A 0-to-1 hardware program takes the hours it takes, in person and at pace, and you have chosen that before.

• Discreet: you handle confidential hardware roadmaps and customer data with care.
  

Nice to Have

• Wearables, smartwatches, drones, robotics, AR/VR, or defense wearables on your résumé.

• Camera systems: sensor selection, MIPI and ISP pipelines, and multi-camera synchronization.

• Low-power and battery design, BLE or Wi-Fi, and antenna integration in small enclosures.

• Enough mechanical fluency (CAD, tolerances, and materials) to challenge the mechanical team’s choices and be right some of the time.

• Prior founder or founding-engineer experience, including the parts that went wrong.

• Open-source hardware or firmware contributions.

Pay Transparency

Compensation includes base salary and equity. The salary range for this role is shown on this posting.

What We Offer

• Agency: real ownership from day one, and decisions that actually matter.

• Freedom: to choose how you solve the problem, without layers of approval.

• A seat on a rocketship: one of Europe’s fastest-growing deep-tech companies, at the earliest stage.

• Free food and drinks in the office.