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Salary: USD 185,000 - 200,000 / annual
Glacier is a Series A startup based in San Francisco building custom sorting robots and AI-powered business analytics for the recycling industry. The company's technology has been recognized as one of TIME's Best Inventions and featured in major publications including TechCrunch, Fortune, and CBS.
You will lead Glacier's hardware and robotics development, reporting directly to the Co-Founder and CTO. This is a technical leadership role focused on strategy, team development, and architectural decision-making rather than day-to-day design work.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the strategy and execution of Glacier's hardware and robotics roadmap in partnership with Product Management
- Leading, mentoring, and developing the hardware engineering team
- Driving technical decisions and architectural tradeoffs across complex hardware systems
- Establishing lightweight engineering processes to improve execution, quality, and reliability
- Partnering cross-functionally with Operations, Manufacturing, Field Service, and Software teams
- Ensuring machines can be manufactured, deployed, and supported reliably at scale
- Balancing engineering capacity, customer timelines, deployment requirements, cost, and risk
- Stepping in as an individual contributor when needed to unblock critical technical challenges
You should be comfortable getting deep into technical problems, reviewing designs, and providing architectural guidance, but will not be expected to own CAD or execute routine hardware design work.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of hardware engineering experience, including 2+ years leading engineering teams
- Strong technical background in robotics, mechatronics, pneumatics, structural design, and DFM (Design for Manufacturing)
- Experience taking hardware from prototype through production, including contract manufacturing and supply chain management
- Experience building hardware for real-world deployment
- Strong project judgment across engineering capacity, customer timelines, cost, risk, and deployment constraints
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience at an early-stage startup with fewer than 50 employees
- Industrial automation, robotics, or heavy machinery background
- Hardware deployed across multiple customer sites
- Edge deployments or on-site hardware troubleshooting experience
