Head of Hardware
The Subvocal Company, San Francisco, California
Overview
We are looking for someone to take Subvocal from a working research system built with laboratory equipment to a reliable wearable that someone can use in the real world.
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The Subvocal Company, San Francisco, California
We are looking for someone to take Subvocal from a working research system built with laboratory equipment to a reliable wearable that someone can use in the real world.
This is a systems role. Our hardware combines sensitive physiological sensing, mixed-signal electronics, embedded and FPGA systems, high-speed data acquisition, wireless communication, batteries, firmware, mechanical constraints, and eventually custom ASICs. All of those pieces have to work together inside a device that is small, comfortable, stable, and manufacturable.
The difficult part is that this is not ordinary consumer electronics. The hardware is part of the measurement itself. Changing a cable, ground plane, enclosure, sensor position, or power system can alter the data distribution seen by the model. You will work closely with the sensing and ML leads to preserve signal quality while aggressively reducing size, power consumption, and complexity.
You might be a great fit if you have previously taken a difficult hardware product from an early prototype toward production, ideally in wearables, sensing, medical devices, robotics, AR/VR, or another tightly constrained system. You should be comfortable debugging boards at a bench, reading a schematic, working with firmware and FPGA engineers, making mechanical tradeoffs, and managing outside design or manufacturing partners without becoming dependent on them.
We care much more about whether you have repeatedly made real hardware work than whether your previous title was senior enough. The right person will be equally comfortable deciding the overall architecture and personally finding the broken clock, noisy regulator, thermal issue, or intermittent connector that is preventing the prototype from working.
You will have enormous ownership over both the Demo Day device and the architecture that eventually ships to customers.
This is a full-time, in-person role in San Francisco.
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Source: the Y Combinator job board. We last checked this job 2 days ago. We first saw it 5 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 hardware and robotics jobs in the US.
We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.