Founding Hardware Engineer

Navi AI • San Francisco, CA

11d

About The Position

Navi captures everything a pilot sees and hears. The Wave is how we do it — the hardware that lives in the cockpit, captures flight data, and streams it to the cloud in real time. You're building the next generation of that device.
About the role
This is a founding hardware role. You own the entire physical product — from bare-metal architecture through PCB design, ruggedized enclosure, embedded firmware, environmental certification, fleet deployment, and cloud integration. This is Version 2 of the Wave, and you are the definitive technical voice for every decision that shapes it.
The device has to survive cockpit environments — heat, vibration, RF noise — while continuously streaming high-bandwidth audio and telemetry over wireless networks without dropping a frame. It has to be deployable across hundreds of aircraft and manageable as a fleet. It has to meet certification standards for operating in aircraft. And it has to be built fast, because Navi is already deployed at flight schools and the U.S. Air Force and demand is accelerating.
If you thrive in high-autonomy environments and love building mission-critical edge devices that work in the real world — not on a bench — this is your role.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in systems engineering, embedded edge compute, or connected hardware development — with a track record of bringing a complex device to market, not just prototyping one
• Deep understanding of electronics design — PCB schematics, microcontrollers, wireless communication modules (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
• Experience collaborating with industrial or mechanical designers to build ruggedized enclosures that survive challenging thermal, vibrational, and environmental conditions
• Strong proficiency in embedded C/C++ or Python for edge applications, with experience running RTOS or embedded Linux
• Familiarity with edge-to-cloud architecture, device fleet management, and building scalable live data infrastructure
• Hands-on experience navigating rigorous hardware certification processes and environmental testing standards
• You own projects end to end in ambiguous, fast-moving environments — and you ship

Nice To Haves

• Experience with edge processing and lossless streaming of high-bandwidth data — real-time audio, complex signal processing, or continuous telemetry
• Background building hardware for aviation, defense, or other safety-critical regulated industries
• Familiarity with avionics data formats, cockpit audio systems, or aircraft electrical environments

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end technical design of Navi's next-generation edge compute node — architecture, component selection, PCB layout, and mechanical enclosure
• Build hardware that is ruggedized for cockpit environments — thermal, vibrational, and environmental stress — and optimized for continuous wireless data transmission
• Architect real-time data pipelines for processing and streaming high-fidelity audio and complex telemetry from the edge to the cloud with minimal latency
• Own the hardware validation lifecycle — environmental testing, quality assurance, and securing regulatory and industry-specific certifications for hardware operating in aircraft
• Develop and oversee embedded firmware and edge processing logic — real-time operating systems, on-device compute, and fleet-wide OTA update infrastructure
• Guide the architecture of live cloud-based telemetry dashboards to ensure seamless data ingestion and real-time visibility from deployed devices
• Collaborate with software and ML engineers to ensure the hardware captures exactly what the intelligence layer needs to generate automated debriefs

Benefits

• Flight training — earn your pilot's license and build with true domain expertise
• Impact you can see — the device you build will be in cockpits at flight schools, airlines, and the U.S. Air Force
• A role that scales into hardware leadership as we grow

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees