Architecture

Specter; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Specter is seeking a Product Architect to shape the future of its products. This role involves collaborating across engineering teams to explore technical directions and drive product requirements.

The ideal candidate will have over 3 years of experience in product development, focusing on prototyping methodologies, first principles thinking, and engineering fundamentals. Strong communication skills and a self-directed approach are essential for success.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in product development with a focus on 0-to-1 products.
• Ability to design minimal experiments for critical questions.
• Strong fundamentals in both software and hardware engineering.

Responsibilities

• Identify key technical questions and design experiments with minimal effort.
• Survey and translate new technologies into actionable product insights.
• Develop prototypes to mitigate risks in product assumptions.

Skills

Prototyping methodology

First principles thinking

Engineering fundamentals

Experimentation instinct

Technical writing

Job description

The Role

Specter is hiring a product architect to shape the next generation of our products. You will work across engineering teams to explore strategic technical directions, synthesize and drive the requirements of new products, and perform experiments that uncover optimization opportunities and the motivation to invest resources into them.

Responsibilities

• Identify the highest-leverage technical questions facing the product roadmap, and design experiments that resolve them with the least amount of work.
• Survey emerging technologies - sensors, radios, compute, protocols - and translate raw capability into product implications the team can act on.
• Synthesize requirements for new products and features by working backwards from customer environments and forwards from what the hardware-software stack makes newly possible.
• Build minimum viable prototypes that de-risk the riskiest assumption first, and write up findings clearly enough that engineering, product, and the founders can make decisions from them.
• Partner with RF, firmware, ML, and platform teams to hand off validated directions, then stay close enough to course-correct as they are implemented into production.
• Own ambiguous, cross-disciplinary problems end-to-end: scoping, planning, building, measuring, and deciding what's worth shipping.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building real things that shipped - bonus if at least one of them was a 0-to-1 product where you set the direction, not just executed it.
• Strong prototyping methodology - you instinctively reach for the minimal experiment that answers the key question, rather than the impressive one.
• First principles thinking - comfortable working in domains where the textbook answer doesn't exist yet, and willing to derive from physics, math, or measurement instead of analogy.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across software and hardware - you don't need to be world-class in any one stack, but you can read a datasheet, write the script, wire up the bench, interpret and present the results.
• Experimentation instinct - you're driven to find answers to important questions and, more importantly, excel at asking the right ones.
• Self-directing - you turn an open-ended prompt into a plan, a plan into a result, and a result into a recommendation without needing the loop closed for you.
• Clear technical writing and communication - your experimental results change minds because they're honest about what was and wasn't proven.