Head of Hardware Design

About the role

Flux is building the future of hardware creation through AI, and the Head of Hardware Design will be central to that transformation. You will own the end to end hardware design practices and the guiding principles that define how our platform helps users go from idea to manufacturable board. This role requires you to shape the evolution of our ECAD toolset and ensure the correctness and quality of the AI Hardware Engineer's system knowledge and design approach. You will actively partner with product leadership to prioritize AI capability development, define evaluation frameworks, and build scaled approaches that guide our community toward successful PCB projects. You will grow our existing Hardware Design function and team while translating real world engineering constraints into powerful AI behaviors and tools. This is a high impact, multidisciplinary role for an experienced leader who has shipped complex electronics at scale and thrives on turning hardware challenges into elegant, repeatable workflows.

Key facts

What you'll do

Drive ECAD feature design and specifications by crafting product requirements for core ECAD behaviors including placement and routing, constraints management, stackup definition, impedance control, DRC and DFM, manufacturing outputs, and prototyping workflows. You will co author these specifications, validate them through dogfooding initiatives, beta programs, and scaled user feedback, ensuring that every feature aligns with real world design needs. Partner deeply with the AI and machine learning teams to act as the design mentor for the world's first AI hardware engineer, defining best practices, guardrails, and evaluation harnesses that keep designs robust and reliable. Curate datasets, review AI generated designs, and create the AI expertise that will help more people build successful hardware on their first production run without releasing the magic smoke. Build out the Hardware Design function from the ground up, starting as a hands on manager with two existing reports and later refining team responsibilities to include creating reference designs, demos, product specifications, training content, and field feedback loops. Develop real hardware quickly by leading rapid turn around prototypes from schematic through bring up, and instrumenting those designs for signal integrity, power integrity, and thermal validation so that data closes the loop between simulation and reality. Amplify user insight by owning and improving current user experience signals, feedback loops, and channeling customer input into our iterative product design, while strategically investing in deeper customer relationships and championing the user's voice in cross functional forums. Act as the product voice of the customer within the organization, addressing vision, strategy, research and discovery, prioritization, and cross functional leadership to ensure hardware workflows meet market demands. Partner closely with our software engineering department to ensure AI evaluations reflect real world user requirements, aligning model behavior with the physics and constraints of actual hardware manufacturing and assembly. Continuously explore emerging tools, methodologies, and workflows that can accelerate time to quality for our community, reducing friction at every step from concept to assembled board.

Requirements

Bring deep electrical engineering breadth and depth with real products in the field, spanning RF and wireless from sub GHz to mmWave, including matching, filtering, antenna, and feed layout. You must have hands on experience with EMI, EMC, and ESD design for compliance, defining grounding and return paths, shielding strategies, and filtering techniques that pass regulatory tests. Demonstrate expertise in power electronics, including DC DC converters such as buck and boost, PMICs, power over Ethernet, motor and actuator control, power sequencing, and efficiency thermal trade offs that impact real world performance. Show advanced analog and mixed signal skills with sensor interfaces, data converters, and low noise design, as well as high speed digital knowledge covering DDRx, PCIe and SerDes, USB C and USB4, MIPI, and Ethernet from 1G to 25G and beyond. You should understand signal integrity and power integrity deeply, including analysis, decoupling strategies, and return path control, and be fluent in PCB and stackup expertise, from material selection and stackup definition to controlled impedance, differential pair tuning and length matching, via strategies including blind and buried vias, microvia and backdrill, HDI, panelization, and build rules with fabs and EMS partners. Have tooling fluency with multiple ECAD environments such as Altium, Cadence Allegro or OrCAD, Mentor Xpedition, KiCad, and Zuken, combined with simulation tools like SPICE, SI and PI analysis through ADS, HyperLynx, or SIwave, and 3D EM tools such as HFSS, plus lab instrumentation including oscilloscopes, VNAs, logic analyzers, and power analyzers. You must possess product sense and communication skills that turn messy user needs into simple workflows and clear system architectures that diverse teams can execute against. You should have experience leading hardware design teams, setting clear responsibilities, refining core duties, and developing engineers who can contribute to reference designs, demos, specifications, training, and feedback loops that improve our platform over time. Be prepared to work in the San Francisco office, adhere to full time hours, and meet any applicable visa and travel requirements as defined by our policies.

Nice to have

Only items explicitly indicated as preferred in SOURCE are included here, and no additional preferences are added.

Practical notes

Full time hours, office-based work in San Francisco, and compliance with visa and travel requirements apply as stated in SOURCE.