Head of Engineering Operations

The role

You will own the technical layer of the ingest pipeline, hardware fleet, and quality control. This involves building and maintaining ingest stations, managing hardware inventory, and automating workflows with scripts.

What you will do

• Build, configure and maintain ingest stations
• Own ingest tooling in the field and deploy updates
• Define verification and media lifecycle rules
• Act as escalation for failed and partial ingests
• Audit processes to close gaps
• Maintain inventory of capture devices, memory cards and drives
• Specify and evaluate hardware and manage supplier claims
• Plan hardware capacity
• Investigate recording failures and decide on repairs or retirement
• Train operators on tooling and hardware

Required qualifications

• A degree in engineering or computer science, or equivalent hands-on experience
• Comfort in Linux: mounting and formatting media, filesystems, permissions, scheduled jobs, reading logs
• Working Python
• Fluent use of AI tools
• Hardware troubleshooting instinct
• Real care about data integrity and chain of custody
• Clear written English
• Willingness to work with physical equipment and travel to sites
• Comfort in an environment where the process may not exist yet

Nice to have

• Experience with cameras or sensor hardware
• SQL, or experience querying an internal API for reporting
• Storage systems — RAID, ZFS, network-attached storage administration
• Prior work in data collection, field operations, logistics or laboratory operations
• Barcode or asset-tracking systems

About the company

Human Archive is a research lab backed by Y Combinator focused on modeling human embodied intelligence. Founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers, they build custom hardware products, deploy them globally at scale, and publish research.