The role

• Strategic ownership. You are a core member of the leadership team, with strategic influence over R&D priorities, product roadmap, capital allocation, and growth planning.
• Scale the current product to hundreds. Deliver hundreds of units on time and at the quality our customers expect, optimizing the design to raise field reliability and manufacturing yield.
• Lead next-gen design to deliver thousands. Own the end-to-end design process for our next-generation products. Invest in R&D that delivers significant improvements for our customers, and lead the team to build it at scale.
• Build a repeatable engine. Put in place the process, tooling, and documentation that let us go from concept to volume production predictably. Each iteration is a preparation for the next.
• Set engineering standards. As the tech lead, you will set expectations for quality, documentation, DFM/DFA, change control, and test coverage.
• Drive build vs. buy. Lead the decisions on what we design in-house vs. outsource, what we assemble ourselves vs. contract out, and where off-the-shelf parts are the right answer.
• Evaluate suppliers. Work with procurement to run a structured process to specify, evaluate, and select components and vendors.
• Build an elite hardware team. Hire a hardware team matched to the depth of design work ahead: mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing.
• Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with Software, Autonomy, Product, and Customer Operations to deliver a product that meets market needs.

• Shipped at volume. Track record leading teams that delivered complete systems from concept to customer, at thousands of units.
• 10+ years with similar hardware. Extensive experience developing robotics or comparable electromechanical systems and taking them from prototype to volume production.
• Technical and team leadership. You have both the technical depth and the leadership experience to make the right decisions, make the hard decisions, and deliver on time.
• Full lifecycle ownership. Hands-on experience running an engineering process from requirements → EVT/DVT/PVT builds → scaled production.
• Supplier expertise. Experience with supplier selection and management, including sourcing custom or hard-to-find components and evaluating vendor quality with a strict IQC process.
• Team builder. Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers.c