Lead, AI Hardware Design Skunkworks

The role

You will hire and lead a team of four or five hardware builders in Valencia, Spain, building real hardware with AI in a skunkworks. You will pick design problems, run a portfolio of live bets, and hold a budget you spend without an approval process.

What you will do

• Hire and build a team of 4 to 5 builders covering electrical, RF, mechanical, and agents and tooling
• Pick real design problems and build them yourself with real hardware requirements
• Run a portfolio of six to ten live bets, each with an owner and a kill condition, reviewed monthly
• Hold and spend the budget, with a same-day conversation with the sponsor for anything above 50k
• Move working capabilities into use by engineers outside the team
• Run the team rhythm: a weekly build and a monthly public demo day

Required qualifications

• Hardware you designed and shipped yourself, taken from intent to measured results on a bench
• Engineering judgement from hardware that was built, measured and signed off, including spotting when a simulation is wrong
• Python code at minimum
• Hands-on use of modern AI tooling
• At least one unreasonable thing you built fast, and the ability to show it
• Experience hiring people, or clear evidence you can recognise a good builder
• Working English

Nice to have

• Space, defence or another high-reliability domain
• Code-defined EDA or CAD tools such as atopile, KiCad scripting or build123d
• Simulation in the loop such as SPICE, FEA or full-wave EM
• Experience running a small team with its own money
• Spanish

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• Health and wellbeing benefits, which vary by location and are confirmed by Talent Acquisition
• Continuous professional development and training opportunities

Before you apply

• Employment is subject to applicable security screening
• Parts of the work fall under export control
• Export control and personnel screening are discussed openly in the first conversation
• Interview includes a day of building something on a real problem

About the company

ICEYE is a Finland-headquartered provider of sovereign intelligence from space, operating a large SAR radar satellite constellation for defence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. It has over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.