Head of Engineering

About the role

Dyna Robotics is seeking a Head of Engineering to build and lead a blended organization that spans hardware, software, AI systems, and deployment-facing product work. This role owns the design of team structure, operating rhythm, communication loops, and execution discipline required to translate research breakthroughs into reliable, commercial deployments. The hire will not be a pure technical architect or a staff-plus IC but will instead deeply engage with complex hardware-software and AI-enabled systems to ask the right questions and align experts. Your primary mandate is organizational: you will build the team, retain strong people, manage progress, share context, and ensure execution across ambiguous, high-stakes initiatives. You will work closely with founders and senior leadership across ML Research, Hardware, Software, Operations, Product, and Deployment to reinforce Dyna's advantage of tightly coupling research, engineering, and real-world feedback. This is an on-site role based in Redwood City, California.

What you'll do

• Team Building & Retention: Hire, onboard, grow, and retain individual contributors and managers; build leadership capacity, clear ownership, useful feedback loops, and career paths before the organization outgrows them.
• Operating Cadence & Resource Bottlenecks: Set planning cadences, milestones, owners, decision forums, and progress visibility while identifying bottlenecks across people, decisions, dependencies, hardware access, deployment support, and cross-team capacity.
• Execution Ownership: Drive large, cross-functional initiatives from definition through field validation, launch, and post-deployment learning; define readiness criteria and operating metrics so quality, reliability, and safety risks are visible before deployment.
• Research-to-Deployment Loop: Partner with research, software, hardware, and operations so that customer deployment feedback becomes actionable engineering and research priorities.
• Vision & Context Alignment: Translate leadership-team vision into clear execution context for managers and ICs, keeping teams aligned on goals, tradeoffs, risks, timelines, resource constraints, and next decisions.
• Cross-Functional Coordination: Act as the connective tissue between researchers, engineering leads, hardware teams, operations, deployment, product, field operators, executives, and customers to maintain clarity and urgency.
• Process and Metrics: Establish operational rhythms and metrics that surface risks early, enable rapid course correction, and ensure that physical systems and AI models meet commercial-grade standards.
• Talent Development: Mentor senior engineers and managers, define technical career ladders, and create an environment where specialists can contribute deep expertise while collaborating effectively.
• Stakeholder Communication: Provide concise, high-signal updates to leadership and investors by synthesizing technical and operational data into clear narratives about progress, risk, and outcomes.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive retrospectives and learning loops so that deployments inform future research and hardware designs, reinforcing Dyna's learning advantage in real-world environments.

Requirements

• Engineering Leadership & Org Building: 10+ years in hardware, software, robotics, or complex systems engineering, including 4+ years managing engineers and 1+ year managing managers, with a track record hiring, scaling, retaining, and developing teams through fast growth and ambiguity.
• Operating Discipline: Strong instincts for planning, accountability, risk management, execution reviews, readiness tracking, resource bottleneck detection, and clearing systemic blockers without becoming the technical owner of every detail.
• Hardware + Software Systems Context: Real understanding of environments where software/AI, hardware, and real-world deployment are tightly coupled, such as AV, AR/VR, robotics, drones, consumer electronics, smart devices, or AI-enabled manufacturing; enough technical judgment to align specialists without acting as the primary IC.
• Research-to-Deployment Fluency: Experience taking research prototypes, complex hardware-software systems, or physical AI products toward dependable real-world deployment.
• Cross-Functional Communication: Ability to coordinate clearly with researchers, engineering leads, hardware, operations, deployment, product, field operators, executives, and customers, translating leadership direction into execution-team context without losing ownership, urgency, or clarity.
• Execution in Ambiguity: Comfortable making progress with incomplete information, defining interim solutions, and advancing multi-threaded initiatives while maintaining alignment on quality, safety, and timelines.
• Judgment and Decision Making: Capable of making timely decisions with incomplete data, documenting assumptions, and adjusting course as new field feedback and technical constraints emerge.
• Availability: Must be able to work on-site in Redwood City during standard business hours and participate in occasional after-hours deployments or incident responses as needed.

Nice to have

• Relevant Backgrounds: Robotics is a strong plus, but not required. Strong candidates may come from AV, AR/VR, drones, consumer electronics, smart devices, hardware + software platforms, AI-enabled manufacturing, or similar complex hardware-software environments.
• Org Scaling: Experience scaling an engineering organization through multiple layers of management.
• Field Feedback Loops: Experience building deployment-feedback loops where real-world operational data directly informs product and research roadmaps.

Practical notes

This is an on-site role based in Redwood City, California, requiring consistent presence during standard business hours. Travel may be required for deployments, customer visits, or team offsites. Employment is at-wisk. Visas may be sponsored for qualified candidates. The position requires readiness to engage with physically integrated systems where software, hardware, and real-world conditions intersect.