Head of Hardware

About the job

Head of Hardware

Stealth, VC-backed, seed stage. San Francisco or New York, hybrid in office and remote. First hardware hire.

We make a computer for children aged six to twelve. Anti-brain rot, pro creativity and leatning. Sold to parents as a tutor rather than a toy, because a tutor is taken seriously and a toy is outgrown.

The software holds a memory of the child that follows them as they grow. The hardware has to be an object a six year old can use daily and a twelve year old is not embarrassed by.

The role.

You own the physical product, end to end, our first full time Hardware hire to work alongside founding team. You hold the design brief, run both partners, own EVT, DVT, PVT and mass production release, own the BOM and the landed cost model, and own the ship date. You are the single person accountable for the thing a child holds.

This is a product and program role with deep technical judgement, not a bench engineering seat. At our volumes, on a sourced platform, with partner-led manufacturing, the binding constraint is not engineering horsepower. It is coordination across partners, decision velocity, and knowing what good looks like at each gate. And being willing to say so before the steel is cut.

You will not sit in CAD all day. You will not design the electronics. You will not manage a team for at least a year. You will be the hardware organisation before you build one.

Requirements.

Shipped at least one consumer electronics product from concept through mass production. Sat through EVT, DVT and PVT personally, and can describe what went wrong at each. Worked directly with CMs or ODMs in Asia and can read a factory. Comfortable owning a bill of materials and a cost model, not only a design file. Has worked in genuine constraint: small team, tight calendar, no safety net.

Strongly preferred.

Children's product experience or another regulated consumer category. Accessory or modular ecosystem experience rather than a single SKU. Has taken a function from partner-led to in-house and knows where that breaks. Silicone, injection moulding or enclosure depth.

What this becomes.

Within eighteen months this is a team: design engineering, NPI, quality, and eventually supply chain in-house. You will hire it, and the shape of it is yours to argue for.

If you want to run a large organisation immediately, this is the wrong seat. If you want to own an object end to end and build the team around it, this is a rare one.

Compensation.

Competitive base $165k - $250k+ plus meaningful equity as the first hardware hire.