Vice President - Engineering

Vector Wave is building the Analog Processing Unit (APU), the world’s first programmable neuromorphic processor that runs AI inference on raw radio-frequency waveforms pre-digitization. Conventional RF systems must digitize the signal before any AI inference can occur, fundamentally limiting the latency, power consumption, and performance of wireless edge compute. The APU bypasses these bottlenecks by performing the AI signal processing fully in analog.

We are a venture-backed MIT spinout translating award-winning research into new wireless products with fundamentally new capabilities. With applications spanning defense (electronic warfare, spectrum awareness, anti-jam) and commercial wireless (Wi-Fi and 5G/6G spectrum sharing, interference management), we are building a team of engineers who are excited to transform the future of wireless communications!

We're hiring our first VP of Engineering to turn a working prototype into products customers integrate into their own systems. You will report to the CEO and work closely with the CTO, the original inventor of the APU architecture.

Your role will be to run the engineering organization (the team, execution, delivery, and engineering process from prototype hardware to production) and work with the CTO to achieve Vector Wave’s technical vision and architecture roadmap.

This is a role that requires both deep experience in leadership and a willingness to do hands‑on engineering work alongside the team. You will start with a small engineering team, build it out across the disciplines listed below, and technically contribute where your expertise is strongest.

Location: This is an in-person, full-time role at our office in the Greater Boston area. There likely will be some travel to customers, conferences, and manufacturing partners.

• Build and lead the engineering team: hiring plan, recruiting, onboarding, coaching, and performance.

• Own engineering planning and delivery: roadmaps, milestones, resourcing, and trade‑offs between schedule, cost, and performance.

• Own the path to production: design, build, test, and characterization with packaging, assembly, and test partners.

• Evaluate commercial partners for production and manage relationships with them.

• Continually structure and improve the lab, test infrastructure, and engineering practices a hardware company runs on: design reviews, release and change control, documentation, and test coverage.

• Deliver engineering milestones aligned to customer and internal roadmaps.

• Work with the CTO on architecture, technical risk, and other key decisions.

• Lay the groundwork for quality, reliability, and qualification as products move toward defense and commercial production.

You’ll build a team that spans:

• RF and microwave hardware design

• Analog and mixed‑signal circuit design, including RFIC and MMIC design

• Packaging and ASIC, SoC & SiP integration

• New product introduction (NPI)

• RF test and characterization, from the bench and over the air through production test

• Embedded firmware for control, configuration, and calibration

• Software: the SDK, drivers and APIs, and the toolchain that takes trained models onto our hardware

• Machine learning for RF signals, including models built to run on analog hardware

• Software‑defined radio (SDR) and wireless test infrastructure

• Systems and applications engineering, from requirements to reference designs and customer integration

• Quality, reliability, and qualification, plus lab and test technicians, as we approach production

In your first year, you’ll:

• Hire the first wave of the team.

• Lead development of the MVP through design release, assembly, test, and characterization with partners.

• Structure and improve the lab and…