Director of Hardware Engineering

The role

The Director of Hardware Engineering will lead hardware and robotics development. This person will own the hardware roadmap and lead mechanical and electrical engineering teams.

What you will do

• Own the strategy and execution of the hardware and robotics roadmap
• Lead, mentor, and develop the hardware engineering team
• Drive technical decisions and architectural tradeoffs across complex hardware systems
• Establish lightweight engineering processes
• Partner with Operations, Manufacturing, Field Service, and Software to resolve cross-functional issues
• Ensure machines can be manufactured, deployed and supported reliably at scale
• Balance engineering capacity, customer timelines, deployment requirements, cost, and risk
• Step in as an IC when needed to unblock critical technical challenges

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of hardware engineering experience
• 2+ years leading engineering teams
• Strong technical background in robotics, mechatronics, pneumatics, structural design, and DFM
• Experience taking hardware from prototype through production, including contract manufacturing and supply chain
• Experience building hardware for real-world deployment
• Strong project judgment across engineering capacity, customer timelines, cost, risk, and deployment constraints

Nice to have

• Experience at an early-stage startup (<50 employees)
• Industrial automation, robotics, or heavy machinery experience
• Hardware deployed across multiple customer sites
• Edge deployments or on-site hardware troubleshooting experience

Benefits

• Competitive equity compensation
• Benefits

About the company

Glacier is a Series A startup based in San Francisco that builds custom sorting robots and AI-powered business analytics to improve recycling.