Senior Product Engineer, Hardware

Sage Ox is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. At Sage Ox, 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.

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 '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.

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 lands. 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 toward fleets of millions of customer devices in the field. You can't run at millions when every change risks a days-long debug — the small fleet on the bench is how we earn the confidence to get there.

• Drive firmware and hardware development. Today that's the Ox Dot — a small audio device: boot, memory, audio pipeline, connectivity, the whole stack that has to Just Work in someone's home or office. Tomorrow it's whatever device we choose next.
• Build the development harness. The single highest-leverage thing here isn't a feature — it's the tooling that lets an agent drive a real device end-to-end: flash, exercise, observe, assert, recover, repeat. You'll extend and reinvent the APIs that make a physical device agent-operable.
• Stand up 24×7 automated hardware testing. A small fleet…