Head of Hardware
About the role
Lead the team that designs and builds Ultra's high-performance warehouse robots, taking complex electromechanical systems from concept to production, with budget and leadership responsibilities.
Responsibilities
- Strategic ownership. You are a core member of the leadership team, with strategic influence over R&D priorities, product roadmap, capital allocation, and growth planning.
- Scale the current product to hundreds. Deliver hundreds of units on time and at the quality our customers expect, optimizing the design to raise field reliability and manufacturing yield.
- Lead next-gen design to deliver thousands. Own the end-to-end design process for our next-generation products. Invest in R&D that delivers significant improvements for our customers, and lead the team to build it at scale.
- Build a repeatable engine. Put in place the process, tooling, and documentation that let us go from concept to volume production predictably. Each iteration is a preparation for the next.
- Set engineering standards. As the tech lead, you will set expectations for quality, documentation, DFM/DFA, change control, and test coverage.
- Drive build vs. buy. Lead the decisions on what we design in-house vs. outsource, what we assemble ourselves vs. contract out, and where off-the-shelf parts are the right answer.
- Evaluate suppliers. Work with procurement to run a structured process to specify, evaluate, and select components and vendors.
- Build an elite hardware team. Hire a hardware team matched to the depth of design work ahead: mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing.
- Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with Software, Autonomy, Product, and Customer Operations to deliver a product that meets market needs.
Qualifications
- Shipped at volume. Track record leading teams that delivered complete systems from concept to customer, at thousands of units.
- 10+ years with similar hardware. Extensive experience developing robotics or comparable electromechanical systems and taking them from prototype to volume production.
- Technical and team leadership. You have both the technical depth and the leadership experience to make the right decisions, make the hard decisions, and deliver on time.
- Full lifecycle ownership. Hands-on experience running an engineering process from requirements → EVT/DVT/PVT builds → scaled production.
- Supplier expertise. Experience with supplier selection and management, including sourcing custom or hard-to-find components and evaluating vendor quality with a strict IQC process.
- Team builder. Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers.
Skills
Benefits
- equity + benefits
About Ultra
Practical, general-purpose robots for repetitive industrial tasks
Ultra builds practical, general-purpose robots that are deploying—and producing ROI—today. Unlike traditional industrial automation that’s rigid and complex, our robots are zero integration (able to be installed in hours, not weeks) and are highly flexible, capable of quickly learning new tasks and delivering immediate value to customers. Founded by a team of three-time entrepreneurs with a decade of collaboration, Ultra moves fast. We already have robots in the field generating revenue and data, with plans to rapidly scale deployments this year.
More open roles at Ultra
- Head of Pilot Operations4d agoNew York, NY · Operations
- Founding Product4d agoHybrid (New York City, NY) · Product / Ops
- Facilities & Office Manager4d agoNew York, NY · Operations
- Technical Program Manager, Data & Autonomy2w agoNew York City, NY · Operations
- Data Operations Associate2w agoNew York, NY · Operations