Product Engineer, Hardware

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** This role is based in Seattle, Washington (open to considering San Francisco-based candidates)
** Sage Ox is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. We're building toward a world where humans and AI coworkers 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.

This is a full-stack role whose center of gravity is our hardware — the first hire dedicated to it. A large portion of your time is on the Dot today; the rest is genuinely full-stack — the cloud services the device talks to, the app and web experiences people actually use, and everything in between, 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, so you flex with it — bringing up a device from another manufacturer, or picking up a different corner of the stack entirely, without missing a beat.

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.## Location — Seattle, In Person
** This job is done in person, in Seattle, five days a week.
** Not remote. Not hybrid. Not "in person to start." At the speed we're moving, being in the same room is essential, and we strongly believe that magic happens when people are in the flow together working on ambitious problems. If you're looking for a remote or remote-friendly role, please don't apply to this one — we'd rather you not spend the time.

Two narrow situations we'll still talk to you about. Both are in person; neither is remote work:

- ** You'd be relocating to Seattle.
** For select Staff/Principal-level candidates, we may help with some basic relocation costs. You'd be here, in the office, like everyone else.

- ** You're in the Bay Area.
** Through the end of 2026, we may consider a San Francisco–based candidate who can be in Seattle, in person, at least two weeks a month.

That's the whole list. Outside of those two, this role requires living in the Seattle area and working alongside the team on site.## What You'll Actually Ship Everyone here has the agency to figure out what the product needs and go make it happen — junior or senior, nobody waits for a spec. Your center of gravity is the hardware, but the job runs the whole loop around it.

Pick a week at random and you might be:

- Driving firmware and hardware on the Ox Dot — boot, memory, the audio pipeline, connectivity — the whole stack that has to Just Work in someone's home or office.

- Building the development harness — the tooling that lets an AI coworker drive a real device end-to-end, and the APIs that make it fully operable that way.

- Standing up 24×7 automated hardware testing — a small fleet of real devices under continuous, unattended test, with Behavior-Driven Development scenarios as the source of truth for "does the device actually do the thing," on silicon, not just in a simulator.

- Shipping firmware safely to devices already in customers' hands: staged rollout, health-gated updates, and A/B rollback so a bad update never bricks a device. At millions of devices in the field, the update pipeline
* is* the product.

- Writing the cloud services the device talks to and the app and web experiences people actually use — the device is only half the product — plus the memory and AI-coworker systems, auth, and real-time streaming underneath, kept honest against our digital twins.

- Building the pipeline that turns a bare…