Head of Engineering
About this role
This role leads the technical execution of a body-worn sensing platform, owning architecture through shipping while managing a distributed engineering team across San Francisco and India. You'll make weekly design and integration decisions across power, synchronization, firmware, and mechanical domains, and directly impact the product and model capabilities at a pivotal moment for the company.
What you'll do
- Own technical execution of a body-worn sensing platform from architecture through shipping.
- Lead and coordinate a distributed team of specialists across San Francisco and India.
- Make design and integration decisions across power systems, sensor synchronization, firmware/embedded Linux, and mechanical structure.
- Define and maintain the complete hardware system architecture so all subsystems integrate into a coherent wearable product.
- Translate product requirements into clear, actionable engineering briefs for the team abroad.
- Review and critique mechanical designs with engineering justification focused on wearability and durability.
- Debug firmware and system issues using schematics, logic analyzers, and serial logs.
- Live in India and travel to San Francisco regularly (roughly one week per month).
- Shape hiring and interview criteria for future engineering teammates to grow team capability.
- Own meaningful systems from day one and measure impact on product and model capabilities.
What Human Archive is looking for
- 6+ years of engineering experience, with 6–10+ years focused on hardware engineering for wearable hardware, robotics, motion capture, or field-deployed devices.
- US citizen/visa only.
- Proven track record of shipping at least one hardware product from first prototype to real users.
- Hands-on power-systems expertise: personally designed a multi-rail battery-powered architecture and can size protection, choose regulator topology, and explain first-power behaviors.
- Deep experience solving sensor synchronization across mismatched sample rates and variable bus latencies, including firmware-level timestamping and diagnosing real misalignment in datasets.
- Firmware and embedded Linux experience bringing up SoM/SBC platforms and debugging timing, interrupt, or buffer issues.
- Strong mechanical judgment to critique load paths, tolerance stack-up, strain relief, and real-world wearable requirements.
- Experience operating as a staff/principal/founding engineer (not solely as an engineering manager) and leading distributed teams across time zones.
- Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to translate product needs into precise engineering briefs and influence hiring.
Company at a glance
Human Archive is a robotics data lab that collects large-scale, real-world, annotated multimodal datasets of humans performing everyday tasks across household and industrial environments, collaborating with frontier robotics labs and foundation model groups to accelerate humanoid deployment at scale.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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