Senior Product Engineer, Hardware

About the role

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. We believe the future of work is deeply human and collaborative. As agents take on execution, coordination, and routine work, people gain space for creativity, judgment, relationships, and the work of imagining, deciding, and creating together. Humans become more productive individually and better at working with each other, leaning on AI coworkers to carry out execution and raise collaboration quality. We're looking for strategic hires — fearless, creative, independent thinkers — that will shape the future of the company and how work is done in the modern world. There's no trail yet; pioneering and breaking trails is a core value. You'll be one of the first ten people cutting it.

Responsibilities

• Drive firmware and hardware development for the Ox Dot (boot, memory, audio pipeline, connectivity, etc.) and future devices.
• Build the development harness that lets agents flash, exercise, observe, assert, recover, and repeat on real devices.
• Stand up a 24×7 automated hardware test lab with a small fleet of real devices running continuous unattended tests.
• Run the agentic software factory: enable agents to operate devices zero‑humans‑in‑the‑loop, then scale to fleets developing, exercising, and self‑triaging bench devices.
• Own OTA and fleet management: staged rollout, health‑gated updates, A/B rollback to keep millions of devices healthy.
• Write cloud services the device talks to and build the app and web experiences people use (memory, agent systems, auth, real‑time streaming).
• Get devices ready to ship: provisioning, first‑boot, pairing, auth, and all pre‑customer steps.
• Evaluate upcoming hardware candidates: bring devices in, tear them down, assess viability.
• Own the physical product with suppliers: drive customizations to outer shell and accessories.

Requirements

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• Experience owning systems end‑to‑end, living with decisions in the field, and knowing which corners are safe to cut.
• Built complex code that runs on a physical device (shipped consumer product or bench‑hacked firmware).
• Comfortable using logic analyzers, soldering irons, and thinking outside the box to make devices controllable, observable, and abusable by automation.

Qualifications

• Use agentic AI coding as a daily practice (Claude Code or equivalent); you build the system that builds the code.
• Think in systems, not functions: see the whole loop — device, harness, cloud, agent — and tighten it.
• Have built and shipped side projects or active open‑source contributions.
• Willing to bet on unproven approaches when the proven one is too slow; demonstrate agency and drive.
• (Bonus) Prior experience leading a team or directing AI coworkers through hard problems.

Skills

• Firmware development (boot, memory, audio pipeline, connectivity).
• Hardware bring‑up and test harness creation.
• Automated QA and behavior‑driven testing on real devices.
• OTA update pipelines with staged rollout and A/B rollback.
• Cloud services development (APIs, real‑time streaming, auth).
• Frontend/web and mobile app experiences.
• Device provisioning, first‑boot, pairing, and authentication flows.
• Supplier engagement and supply‑chain customization.
• Agentic AI‑driven development workflows.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Basic relocation help for Staff/Principal candidates.