Head of Hardware (m/f/d) - #2699863

Your mission

The Role

As Head of Hardware you own the physical realization of our humanoid platform. You take the robot from a working prototype to a machine that can be built repeatably, reliably, and at rising volume. You come from mechanical engineering and have shipped mechanically demanding products in serious quantities. You are not an electronics designer, but you have led enough electronics work to hold that discipline to the same standard: to read a power budget, question a thermal margin, and know when a schematic review is being rushed.

You work directly with the founders and with the Head of System, who owns the robot's architecture and behavior. You own how that architecture becomes a physical product. The Mechanical Lead, Electronics Lead, and Integration & Operations Lead report to you.

Key Responsibilities

• Physical product ownership. Own structures, actuation packaging, electronics integration, harnessing, and thermal behavior of the robot as a built object.
• Industrialization. Drive the path from one-off builds to repeatable low-volume production and beyond: DFM, tolerance strategy, supplier and tooling decisions, build documentation, and yield.
• Engineering leadership. Build, mentor, and lead the mechanical, electronics, and integration teams. Set the hiring bar and grow leads into the roles the company will need in two years.
• Standards and process. Establish design review practice, release and change control, requirements traceability into physical design, and the technical decision frameworks that keep a growing team coherent.
• Reliability and validation. Own robustness and lifetime of the hardware. Define what has to be tested, drive the test infrastructure, and make validation results the basis of design decisions rather than an afterthought.
• Safety in the physical domain. Champion safety-first engineering for machines that share space with people, working with our functional safety work in ISO TC299 and the emerging humanoid standards.
• Supply chain and cost. Own hardware cost structure, supplier selection, and the make-versus-buy decisions that determine how fast we can scale.
• Interface with system architecture. Partner with the Head of System so that architectural decisions are made with manufacturability, cost, and serviceability on the table from the start.

Your profile

Who We Are Looking For

• Depth in mechanical engineering. 10+ years with a mechanical or mechatronics core, including hands-on years before the leadership years. You have designed real parts and lived with the consequences.
• Shipped at scale. You have taken a mechanically demanding product from prototype to series production in automotive, industrial machinery, or a comparable consumer hardware category. You know what breaks between a working prototype and a thousand units, because you have been there.
• Electrical breadth. You have led or closely worked with electronics teams. You can evaluate an EE architecture, challenge assumptions on power, EMC, and thermal, and recruit and assess electronics engineers with confidence. Deep circuit design is not expected.
• Leadership of leads. You have built organizations of 20 or more engineers across disciplines and have managed managers, not only individual contributors.
• Supplier and manufacturing fluency. Real experience with tooling, qualification, and industrialization partners, including the negotiation and escalation that comes with them.
• Mindset. Pragmatic and hands-on. Comfortable in a company where the product is not finished and the answer is often unknown. You would rather see the robot on the bench than the slide about the robot.

Nice to Have

• Experience with robotics, legged systems, or high-dynamic mechatronics.
• Exposure to functional safety in machinery or automotive, for example ISO 13849, IEC 61508, or ISO 26262.
• Background in a company that scaled its hardware organization through a growth phase.