Senior Product Engineer, Hardware

The posting, as SageOx wrote it

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. At SageOx, we believe the future of work is deeply human and collaborative. As agents take on execution, coordination, and routine work, people gain space for what only humans do well: creativity, judgment, relationships, the work of imagining, deciding, and creating together. Humans become not only more productive individually, but better at working with each other, leaning on their AI coworkers to carry out execution and raise the quality of how they collaborate.

We're looking for strategic hires - fearless, creative, independent thinkers - that will shape the future of the company, and how work is done in the modern world.

There's no trail yet. Pioneering and breaking trails is one of our company's core values. You're one of the first ten people cutting it.

THE JOB

We're breaking the trail toward a world where humans and AI agents work as one team — and increasingly, part of that world is physical hardware. The Ox Dot is our first device: a small, always-there presence that gives the hivemind a body in the room. It's real, it's shipping, it's the hardest and most unforgiving surface we build on — and it's one of several hardware bets we're weighing for what comes next.

We're looking for a full-stack engineer whose center of gravity is our hardware — the first hire dedicated to it. A large portion of your time will be on the Ox Dot today: making it stable, making it fast and safe to change, and building the machine that lets a small team (and a fleet of agents) develop hardware the way we already develop software. The rest is genuinely full-stack — you'll write the cloud services the device talks to, build the app and web experiences people actually use, and stitch the whole thing together, from firmware in the field to the pixels on the screen. And we move fast: in a few months the Dot may not be the thing we're building at all. You're someone who flexes with that — bringing up a device from another manufacturer, or picking up a different corner of the stack entirely, without missing a beat.

THE PROBLEM YOU'LL OWN

Building on the Dot is genuinely hard, and we leap in anyway — that's the job. But the hard part can swallow the day: a change lands, something unrelated breaks, and hours disappear into a bisect, because nothing is exercising the Dot deeply and around the clock to catch a regression the moment it happens. The result is that we don't innovate nearly as much as we could — the challenge of debugging keeps stealing the oxygen.

Your job is to change that. You'll stand up a hardware test lab — a small fleet of real devices under automated QA around the clock — so a change is either green or it isn't, and a regression surfaces the moment it lands, not days later. When debugging stops eating the day, the whole team gets to pour that energy back into building the next thing.

And the destination is big: we're building
[…]
a fit if:

• Your instinct is to hand-drive every test on the bench yourself, and the idea of an agent doing it makes you uneasy.
• You want to write firmware and consider tooling, harnesses, and test infrastructure "not real engineering" or someone else's job.
• AI coding tools are something you've tried, not something you live in.

None of that is a knock on great engineers. It's just not this job.

HOW WE HIRE

We don't run technical interviews. No whiteboard algorithms, no four-hour system-design rituals. Clear an initial assessment and we'll invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days, full-time, in person, building something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. The trial will be on terms that are mutually agreed upon. Most of what either side needs to know about fit shows up in those few days, not in a loop of hypotheticals.

Before applying, please learn more about our work trials https://sageox.ai/careers/work-trial.

Ajit wrote up why we hire this way: Read the post https://sageox.ai/blog/rip-tech-interviews

SAGEOX TODAY

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital http://A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub → Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly) — people who've built this kind of infrastructure, and scaled through an acquisition or two, before. We're small on purpose, hiring our first ten. More about the team https://sageox.ai/about

COMPENSATION

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit. That's what the trial is for. Staff/Principal candidates may get basic relocation help.

APPLY

There's no shortage of comfortable places to write software right now. This is not one of them, and that's the point.

We're not working with recruiters or recruiting agencies/consultants at this time — direct applications only, please.