Director of Hardware Engineering

Perry Weather•Dallas, TX

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Perry Weather helps organizations turn hyperlocal weather data into faster, safer decisions when lives, assets, and operations are on the line. Our platform brings software, connected hardware, and real-time weather data into one system trusted by thousands of customers and millions of people each year—from Fortune 500 companies and professional sports leagues to major commercial builders, schools, cities, and golf courses. This is a hands-on leadership role on a small team. You'll be in design reviews, at the bench, and in the firmware, and you'll hire the people who scale it from here. If you're looking to manage managers and run a review cadence, this isn't that job. If you've wanted to own a device business outright and have the engineering depth to do it credibly, it is.

Requirements

10+ years in hardware or embedded engineering, including 3+ years leading engineers directly.
You've led a team through a full product cycle.
Physical products you've shipped at volume, through the full development and validation sequence and into production with a contract manufacturer. You know where these programs slip.
Credibility in both domains. You don't need to be our strongest electrical engineer or firmware engineer, but you need to review both competently and hold the respect of the people doing the work.
A device you made dependable. You inherited or shipped hardware with a field reliability problem, found the causes, and drove the fix through design, firmware, and manufacturing.
Design-for-manufacturing judgment: DFM and DFT, yield and test strategy, and the design choices that drive unit cost.
Embedded Linux and connected-device depth. Board bring-up, OTA and rollback, low-power and power-budget design, and cellular connectivity in places with poor coverage.
Judgment about instrumentation. You've built or bought the diagnostics that let a small team support a large deployed fleet.
Hiring track record. You can attract hardware and firmware engineers in a market where they're scarce.
Actively building with AI today. You have a view on where it helps engineering work and where its output needs to be verified before it reaches a device.
High agency and urgency. You bring proposals rather than waiting for direction, and you close loops without being asked.

Nice To Haves

Ruggedized or outdoor equipment
Solar and battery-powered systems
Industrial sensing and protocols
Audio or high-power output systems
Fleet management of thousands of units
Experience in safety-critical or regulated products

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow our hardware and firmware engineers.
Set the engineering standards: schematic and layout review, code review, test coverage, documentation, and what has to be true before a design moves to the next phase.
Build the career path so strong engineers can grow into senior and lead roles as the team expands.
Own the hardware and firmware roadmap and the dates attached to it. Turn product direction into resourced plans with phase gates, and hold them.
Own firmware release management across the deployed fleet: staged rollout, verification, rollback, and the update process that makes shipping to devices in the field routine.
Be accountable for what ships and when. Surface slips early, with the tradeoff already thought through.
Own field reliability as a tracked number: failure rates by cause, RMA volume and root cause, time between failures, and warranty cost.
Close the loop from the field back into design. Telemetry, returned units, and support escalations should each change the next revision or the next firmware release.
Own fleet diagnostics and observability so we find problems in the field before customers report them.
Own the embedded platform: C++ applications on ARM Linux, connectivity over cellular, provisioning, over-the-air updates, and the security posture of devices deployed on customer property.
Hold firmware to modern software practices. Automated tests, hardware-in-the-loop coverage, CI, and code review so device software gets the same rigor as anything else we ship.
Work with our manufacturing team on build readiness, test procedures, and quality. You own the engineering side of that handoff: production documentation, engineering change orders, sign-off when a component has to be substituted, and driving corrective actions back into the design when something escapes the line.
Work with Product and our hardware PM on what we build next and be the engineering voice on feasibility, cost, and risk.
Work with our platform and software teams on the device-to-cloud contract so hardware and software behave as one system.
Work with Support and CX on the install experience, RMA process, and field learnings, and bring failure patterns back into the roadmap.