Head of Engineering

About you

We are looking for a Head of Engineering that shares our passion for using robotics to accelerate scientific research and want to join a company with a strong moral compass. You’ll also share our obsession with customer satisfaction and continually improving our products.

You are open-minded, passionate, ambitious, and empathetic. You strive for excellence, while also staying humble. You will be joining a startup, and you will work tirelessly to make it grow fast. I expect you to work harder and grow faster than you have ever done, and I will do whatever I can to invest in your career trajectory. If that sounds more exciting than terrifying, please read on.

What You'll Do
 

• You’ll be an integral part of the founding team helping define, build, and evolve the core the company robotics products.
• We’re looking for a long-term partnership. You have a track record of operating across various team sizes and can scale as the organization grows under you. You can recruit and scale a world-class engineering team, specifically SF-based engineers with particular emphasis on robotics, software, and hardware.
• You are thoughtful about how to create a motivating engineering culture that attracts the best engineering talent and empowers them to produce the best work of their lives.
• We’re a small but mighty team and thoughtful about culture. You bring passion and a positive, problem-solving attitude that will inspire other leaders and the engineering team you’ll build. You are a partner in creating a culture of trust which facilitates smart risk-taking as well as direct and open conversations about both the good and the bad.
• We believe in working intelligently. You are execution-focused and thoughtful about trade-offs between execution and perfection in an environment in which there is a premium placed on rapid learning.
• You’ll be a critical founding team member and take that seriously. You act like an owner, know when it’s important to sprint vs. recharge, and focus on outcomes.
• You will start out doing hands on engineering work in the first 2 months, then transition to managing a team 

• You are experienced in Python
• You have shipped software that goes into hardware at some point in your career.
• You are tracking and adopting the latest advances in LLMs, agents, machine learning, foundation models.
• Even though you understand management is high leverage, you love being deeply technical. You would be excited to get hands on and consider doing IC work a vacation (e.g. an “engineerication”).
• You are product-focused and can be an active thought partner in solving user problems simply.
• You have recruited and managed world class in-house engineering teams.
• You (ideally) have some experience at the early stage or have been a founder and understand how to think through trade-offs between scrappiness and user experience
• You (ideally) also have a track record scaling products and a company, so you understand engineering best practices and how to make smart technical decisions that prepare us for the future.