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The Moonshot Factory
2020-08-24T14:41:56-04:00 X, The Moonshot Factory
Technical Lead, Early Stage, X

Hardware Engineering

Mountain View, CA (HQ)

About us:

X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Our goal: 10x impact on the world's most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. 

Our mission at X is to invent and launch "moonshot" technologies that aim to make the world a radically better place. We define a moonshot as the intersection of a big problem, a radical solution, and breakthrough technology.

About the team:

You will join the leadership team of a very early stage team exploring how a mix of new fabrics, robotics and AI/ML might help people with mobility challenges and improve quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. The team is multi-disciplinary, bringing together expertise in machine learning, biomechanics, robotics and soft goods. The project will be in a prototyping phase, rapidly iterating and implementing ideas to progressively de-risk the idea from a technical perspective.

About the role:

In this role, you will oversee all technical planning, development, and hiring. You will report to the Project Lead and help define the team’s product, strategy, budget, and culture. The majority of the role will be management but you should excel at and enjoy contributing high-impact hardware designs, code and other engineering as needed. You will regularly collaborate with Google researchers and AI experts to solve hard technical challenges, some of which have never been solved before.

This is an opportunity to leverage Google’s talent, infrastructure, and reach to create a product that could help billions of people. 

Given the early stage of this project, there will be significant ambiguity but the opportunity to show considerable impact. This is an extremely dynamic team and requires high cross-functional communication, organization, and planning.

How you will make 10x impact: 

  • Lead the project technical roadmap / vision and ensure strong team progress
  • Help define the team’s vision, product, strategy, budget, and culture.
  • Coordinate across team POCs for each workstream (interface, ML, mid-level control / data acquisition) ensuring subteams have context, direction, and clarity 
  • Attract, grow, and retain a diversity of world-class talent, providing technical direction and career growth opportunities. Inspire and motivate the team to work together as a cohesive and productive unit
  • Implement high-performance, early-stage engineering best practices. 
  • Effectively lead collaborations and create influence across senior X, Google Brain, DeepMind and external stakeholders to apply cutting-edge research and drive organizational alignment

What you should have: 

Having as many of these specific qualifications is a plus, but transferable skills/experiences from other adjacent domains may be equally valuable, we care more about who you are than what you’ve done.

  • MS / PhD degree in a STEM field such as Engineering, Robotics CS, Physics, or Neuroscience
  • Qualifications and/or experience in wearable robotics or assistive technologies 
  • Expertise in biomechanics, mechatronics, control theory, embedded systems  and ‘hands on’ electromechanical skills
  • Experience with leading and crafting machine learning systems and control algorithms algorithms such as: deep learning, human-in-the-loop, on-device learning, optimization, signal processing or time-series analysis.
  • Experience with consumer product development, ideally for wearables, garments or soft-goods 
  • Demonstrated mastery of early-stage engineering management, ideally as technical founder of at least one successful startup and leader of several high-performance engineering teams 
  • Experience managing technical projects spanning across multiple teams of different disciplines, ideally including hardware, software and consumer products. 
  • Strong entrepreneurial traits, especially persistence and resourcefulness
  • Empathy, customer focus and a strong passion for impact

It’d be great if you also had these:

  • Be biased to action and will “roll up your sleeves”. Thrive in ambiguity and able to manage your own work 
  • Drive impact, fall in love with problems, not solutions. Fail often, embrace humility.
  • Engineer on the edge of reasonableness, with insufficient resources; a rag-tag crew of scientists, generalists, operating with unrealistic expectations and a low probability of success.
  • Be a source of joy, inspiration and creativity to the team. Help us win the Great Nerfgun War of 2020.

At X, we don't just accept difference - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact us at: x-accommodation-request@x.team.

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Thank you for applying to X, the moonshot factory!

Your application has been received. We appreciate your interest in the open roles at X. Our team will review your materials and if there is a fit, a member of our team will contact you with more information.