Human Archive, San Francisco, California +1
The head of engineering will own the entire technical execution of a body-worn sensing platform — from architecture through shipping — while leading a distributed team of specialists across San Francisco and India.
The head of engineering will make real design and integration decisions every week across all four core domains: power systems, sensor synchronization, firmware and embedded Linux, and mechanical structure.
Power systems: You have personally designed a multi-rail battery-powered architecture — not reviewed someone else's. You can size a protection circuit, choose a regulator topology for a given load profile, and explain the inrush and brownout behavior you encountered on first power-on. You can read a schematic and find a problem.
Sensor synchronization: You have solved the problem of aligning data from multiple sensors with mismatched sample rates and variable bus latencies. You know what a time-stamping strategy looks like at the firmware level, and you know what misalignment actually looks like in a captured dataset — not in theory, in your own data.
Firmware and embedded Linux: You have personally brought up a SoM or SBC platform under real workload. You can read and follow firmware written by someone else well enough to identify a timing bug, interrupt priority issue, or buffer overrun using a logic analyzer or serial log. You do not need to write production firmware, but you must be able to debug it.
Mechanical judgment: You will not own CAD in this role, but you must review, critique, and push back on mechanical designs with engineering justification. You understand load paths, tolerance stack-up, strain relief, and what "designed for the lab" looks like vs. designed for a person wearing it for eight hours.
Human Archive is a robotics data lab founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley dropouts. We work alongside frontier robotics labs and foundation model research groups to collect large-scale, real-world, annotated multimodal datasets of humans performing everyday tasks across household and industrial environments.
We are lean, technical, and operate at extreme speed, taking on unglamorous and conventionally impossible problems that directly unlock step-function gains in model capability.
The deployment of capable humanoids at scale will permanently redefine human labor. Undesirable physical work will disappear, and human effort will shift toward a new era of abundant creativity. This shift is inevitable, and we are building the infrastructure to accelerate it.
We are assembling the best team to solve the hardest problems in embodied intelligence. You will own meaningful systems from day one and see your work directly impact model capabilities. This is a once-in-a-generation inflection point. If you want to leave your dent on humanity and reshape physical labor markets forever, join us!
Human ArchiveSan Francisco
$150K–$200K / yr
Posted May 6, 2026
CNY 80K–CNY 100K / yr
Posted May 9, 2026
Pay not posted
Posted Sep 14, 2026
CNY 80K–CNY 100K / yr
Posted May 9, 2026
CNY 80K–CNY 100K / yr
Posted May 9, 2026
Human ArchiveSan Francisco
$100K–$200K / yr
Posted May 9, 2026
Source: the Y Combinator job board. We last checked this job 2 days ago. We first saw it 8 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now.
This base pay is below the median for director-level software engineering jobs in the Bay Area.
We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.