Head of Hardware
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Zürich
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 6+ years
- Category
- Hardware
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- You have taken at least one product from zero to shipped, with significant ownership of the outcome: as a co-founder, CTO, first hardware hire, or the lead who owned the whole device. Not one subsyste
- Electrical engineering is your home discipline. You have designed boards that shipped, across mixed-signal, power, wireless, and high-speed digital, and you can still do it today.
- You think in systems. You understand how an electrode choice, an enclosure tolerance, and an ADC sample rate interact, and you can hold the mechanical and firmware conversations as a peer, not a custo
- You have led engineers: hired them, grown them, and kept a team shipping through 0-to-1 ambiguity. Typically 6+ years in hardware, but we care more about what you shipped than how long it took.
- A strong understanding of how hardware decisions affect data quality. You know that a great model on a noisy signal still loses to a decent model on a clean one, and you design accordingly.
- Experience taking hardware to small-batch production: DFM, vendor and EMS management, test, and certification.
- Genuinely curious about ML: you read papers, you have trained at least one model end to end, and you understand that dataset quality beats model architecture choice.
- High agency: you don't wait to be told what to do. A 0-to-1 hardware program takes the hours it takes, in person and at pace, and you have chosen that before.
- Discreet: you handle confidential hardware roadmaps and customer data with care.
Nice to have
- Wearables, smartwatches, drones, robotics, AR/VR, or defense wearables on your résumé.
- Camera systems: sensor selection, MIPI and ISP pipelines, and multi-camera synchronization.
- Low-power and battery design, BLE or Wi-Fi, and antenna integration in small enclosures.
- Enough mechanical fluency (CAD, tolerances, and materials) to challenge the mechanical team’s choices and be right some of the time.
- Prior founder or founding-engineer experience, including the parts that went wrong.
- Open-source hardware or firmware contributions.
Full description
Accelerating embodied AGI.
The next ten years of AI will not be won in software. They will be won in the physical world: in factories, hospitals, kitchens, fields, and homes. The companies that own that data will own the century.
microagi is building it. We are a data research and deployment lab. Atlas captures the manual work inside Europe’s industrial champions, trains foundation models on it, and deploys the right robot onto the floor, with no teleoperation and no interruption to the line. Shift records how physical work actually happens and turns it into training-ready data.
We were founded by former Formula 1 engineers from Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, together with a researcher from the Alan Turing Institute. Our $55M seed round, the largest in German history, was led by Hummingbird with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. We are based in Munich, with our research centre in Zürich and teams in London, New York, and Istanbul. We are now building the engineering and research teams that will take Atlas into new industries.
Our models learn from data captured in the physical world, by hardware we design and build ourselves. As Head of Hardware, you own that hardware end to end: electrical, firmware, and the mechanical integration that holds it together, from the first schematic to devices running on factory floors.
You lead the team that builds it. Today that is about six engineers on robotics, three on EMG sensing, and three on camera systems, plus contractors, and it will grow quickly. Our Electrical Engineer and Embedded Engineer roles report to you. You set the architecture they build against, and you still build alongside them.
This is a founder-shaped role, not a management seat. We are looking for someone who has carried a product from a blank page to customers with real skin in the game, wants to build both the thing and the team that builds it, and would rather design than review. If that sounds like you, you will want to do it again at the earliest stage.
What You Will Do
- Own the hardware roadmap for Shift and Atlas data capture: wearables, sensor rigs, camera systems, and prototype robots. What we build, in what order, and why.
- Set the system architecture across electrical, firmware, and mechanical: sensors, compute, power, wireless, and enclosures. Make the trade-offs, and make them stick when disciplines disagree.
- Stay on the bench: schematics, layout reviews, board bring-up, and a scope in your hands when the team is stuck. On the days it matters, you are the best electrical engineer in the room.
- Lead and grow the team: hire, set the bar, run design reviews, and give engineers ownership of whole subsystems rather than tickets.