Principal Engineer, Hardware

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

Job summary

AeroVect, located in San Francisco, is seeking a Principal Engineer for Hardware to lead the technical direction of their vehicle platform.

This role involves taking charge of the integrated mechanical and electrical systems, ensuring reliability and manufacturability of autonomous vehicles.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in hardware engineering and a strong track record in bringing products from concept to volume production.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of hands-on hardware engineering experience.
• Experience with electromechanical actuation systems.
• Proficiency in PCB design and harness design.

Responsibilities

• Set architectural direction for retrofit kits and integrated platforms.
• Partner with software teams for drive-by-wire systems.
• Lead hardware bring-up and ensure reliability and manufacturability.

Skills

Hands-on hardware engineering

Mechanical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electromechanical systems

PCB design and review

Debugging with oscilloscopes

Tools

Mechanical CAD

Lab and bench-level testing

Job description

Who We Are

AeroVect is transforming ground handling with autonomy, redefining how airlines and ground service providers around the globe run day‑to‑day operations. We are a Series A company backed by top‑tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving. Our customers include some of the world’s largest airlines and ground handling providers. For more information, visit www.aerovect.com.

We are hiring a Principal Engineer for Hardware to take technical ownership of the AeroVect vehicle platform — the integrated mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical systems that turn an off‑the‑shelf airport tractor into an autonomous vehicle. This is the role for an engineer who has built real physical products at production volume and who can carry a system from a clean‑sheet architecture through DFM, supplier qualification, validation, and field reliability.

This is an individual contributor role at the most senior level. You will set hardware technical direction, do the hands‑on design work yourself, lead the hardest cross‑discipline decisions, and raise the bar across the hardware organization. You will partner closely with the VP of Engineering and most of the engineering teams, Hardware, Software, Systems, and Safety.

You Will

Vehicle architecture across mechanical and electrical disciplines

• Setting the architectural direction for our retrofit kit and integrated vehicle platforms across generations, trading off cost, reliability, manufacturability, and safety.
• Owning the integration points where mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical subsystems meet — sensor mounts, compute enclosures, wiring harnesses, actuation mechanisms, power distribution — and making sure those interfaces hold up in the field.
• Driving design‑for‑manufacturing rigor into the hardware platform so that our fleet can be produced at volume without continuous engineering involvement on the production line.

Drive‑by‑wire and safety‑critical electromechanical systems

• Partnering with the software teams on the next generation of our drive‑by‑wire stack, covering steering, braking, throttle, and the vehicle interface.
• Defining the redundancy architecture for each drive‑by‑wire subsystem — what requires full dual‑redundancy, what can rely on degraded‑mode fallback, and what the safe state is for each failure scenario.
• Leading the technical work to move toward a certified drive‑by‑wire solution that meets functional‑safety standards (ISO 26262 / ISO 13849) and unlocks driverless operation at scale, including vendor selection and qualification.

Sensor suite, compute, and field reliability

• Owning the next generations of sensor suite design across the relevant sensing modalities, optimized for aviation‑specific requirements, airside survivability, and cost.
• Hardening compute and sensor enclosures against the airside environment based on field failure data, and driving reliability improvements across the vehicle.
• Standardizing the vehicle BOM and assembly documentation so builds and installations are repeatable, high‑quality, and serviceable across the fleet.

Manufacturing and supply chain

• Selecting, qualifying, and managing the technical relationship with suppliers and contract manufacturers.
• Leading hardware bring‑up, PCB revisions, and the discipline around moving from prototype through pilot production into volume manufacturing.

You Have

• 15+ years of hands‑on hardware engineering experience on real, shipped products — vehicles, robotics, industrial equipment, or comparable physical systems operating in demanding environments.
• Genuine dual depth in mechanical and electrical engineering. You don't need to be the world's best in both, but you need to be able to lead designs and design reviews credibly in both disciplines and to make the trade‑offs at the boundary. We are not looking for someone whose "EE experience" stops at reading a schematic.
• Demonstrated experience taking a product from architecture through DFM, supplier qualification, pilot build, and into volume production. You have lived through the transition from "we built ten of these in a lab" to "a contract manufacturer is shipping these."
• Direct experience with electromechanical actuation systems — steering, braking, drive systems — including the controls, firmware, and PCB work that surrounds them.
• Strong hands‑on competence: PCB design and review, harness design, mechanical CAD, lab and bench‑level bring‑up, and the kind of debugging that requires an oscilloscope rather than a stack trace.
• A clear track record of working on hardware that has to be reliable, not just functional. You understand the difference between something that works in a demo and something that survives 24/7 operation in a hostile environment.

We Prefer

• Experience with functional‑safety standards (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, IEC 61508, or aerospace equivalents) and the engineering discipline they impose on hardware design.
• Direct experience designing or qualifying certified drive‑by‑wire systems, or comparable safety‑critical electromechanical systems.
• Experience working with contract manufacturers at the hundreds‑to‑thousands‑of‑units‑per‑year scale.
• Background in commercial vehicles, off‑highway equipment, industrial robotics, or aerospace ground systems — domains where the environmental and reliability constraints are closer to ours than consumer or pure on‑road automotive.
• Prior experience as the most senior individual contributor in a hardware organization — setting direction, mentoring staff engineers, and partnering with engineering leadership without managing a team yourself.

Why this role at AeroVect?

• A real product in the field. AeroVect tractors run every day, all day, in commercial operation. Your hardware decisions show up in the operational data within weeks, not years.
• Scope across mechanical, electrical, firmware, and manufacturing.
• A defined path to scale, not a science project. A real commercial deployment with a concrete path to removing the safety driver and scaling the fleet. Your hardware decisions have a destination.
• Certified drive‑by‑wire is one of the highest‑value problems in autonomous GSE. Solving it is a hard prerequisite for driverless operation at scale, and the engineer who leads it will have one of the most consequential hardware roles in the industry.